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The world's first continuous room-temperature solid-state maser has been developed by UCL and Imperial College London scientists. The breakthrough, made using a diamond held in a ring of sapphire, opens up the possibility for masers (microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) being used in a wide variety of applications such as medical imaging and airport security scanning.

Scientists researching how tree frogs climb have discovered that a unique combination of adhesion and grip gives them perfect technique. ‌ The new research, led by the University of Glasgow and published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology , could have implications for areas of science such as robotics, as well as the production of climbing equipment and even tyre manufacture.

A new method of creating bendable silicon chips could help pave the way for a new generation of high-performance flexible electronic devices. In two new papers, University of Glasgow engineers describe how they scaled up the established processes for making flexible silicon chips to the size required for delivering high-performance bendable systems in the future, and discuss the barriers which will need to be overcome in order to make those systems commonplace.

Digital memory and security could be transformed according to new research, which has for the first time showed that antiferromagnets can be easily controlled and read by switching the direction of ordinary electrical currents at super-fast speed.

Aviation experts estimate that every commercial airplane in the world is struck by lightning at least once per year. Around 90 percent of these strikes are likely triggered by the aircraft itself: In thunderstorm environments, a plane's electrically conductive exterior can act as a lightning rod, sparking a strike that could potentially damage the plane's outer structures and compromise its onboard electronics.

It's hard to believe that a single material can be described by as many superlatives as graphene can. Since its discovery in 2004, scientists have found that the lacy, honeycomb-like sheet of carbon atoms - essentially the most microscopic shaving of pencil lead you can imagine - is not just the thinnest material known in the world, but also incredibly light and flexible, hundreds of times stronger than steel, and more electrically conductive than copper.

When it comes to soft, assistive devices - like the exosuit being designed by the Harvard Biodesign Lab - the wearer and the robot need to be in sync. But every human moves a bit differently and tailoring the robot's parameters for an individual user is a time-consuming and inefficient process.

Every complex human tool, from the first spear to latest smartphone, has contained multiple materials wedged, tied, screwed, glued or soldered together. But the next generation of tools, from autonomous squishy robots to flexible wearables, will be soft. Combining multiple soft materials into a complex machine requires an entirely new toolbox - after all, there's no such thing as a soft screw.

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity usually measure these signals with electrodes inserted into the brain, a task that is notoriously difficult and time-consuming.

Research news In an electric drive, magnetic fields have to be created in order to transform electric energy into kinetic energy. The magnetic properties of the motor's main components, referred to as electrical steel sheets, are the decisive factor in the efficiency of the electric motor. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have investigated the way these steel sheets are processed and have concluded that using blunt cutting tools deteriorates the magnetic properties of the steel sheets significantly.

Vanadium dioxide's unique properties make it perfect for outperforming silicon and giving rise to a new generation of low-power electronic devices.

In a series of experiments conducted last month, Cambridge researchers experienced weightlessness testing graphene's application in space. This is the first time that graphene has been tested in space-like applications. Andrea Ferrari Working as part of a collaboration between the Graphene Flagship and the European Space Agency, researchers from the Cambridge Graphene Centre tested graphene in microgravity conditions for the first time while aboard a parabolic flight - often referred to as the 'vomit comet'.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab use a new platform, called MAESTRO, to see microscale details in monolayer material's electronic structure To see what is driving the exotic behavior in some atomically thin - or 2-D - materials, and find out what happens when they are stacked like Lego bricks in different combinations with other ultrathin materials, scientists want to observe their properties at the smallest possible scales.

Two of the most rapidly changing glaciers in Antarctica, which are leading contributors to sea-level rise, may behave as an interacting system rather than separate entities, according to a new analysis of radar data. A new study shows that a large and potentially unstable Antarctic glacier may be melting farther inland than previously thought and that this melting could affect the stability of another large glacier nearby - an important finding for understanding and projecting ice sheet contributions to sea-level rise.

At TU Wien, a major step has been taken towards linking electrical and magnetic material properties, which is crucial for possible applications in electronics. It's not exactly a new revelation that electricity and magnetism are closely linked. And yet, magnetic and electrical effects have been studied separately for some time now within the field of materials science.

What if you could run your air conditioner not on conventional electricity, but on the sun's heat during a warm summer's day? With advancements in thermoelectric technology, this sustainable solution might one day become a reality. Thermoelectric devices are made from materials that can convert a temperature difference into electricity, without requiring any moving parts - a quality that makes thermoelectrics a potentially appealing source of electricity.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab study exotic material's properties, which could make possible a new form of data storage Scientists used spiraling X-rays at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to observe, for the first time, a property that gives handedness to swirling electric patterns - dubbed polar vortices - in a synthetically layered material.

Phytoplankton blooms are one of the most important factors contributing to the efficiency of the carbon pump in the North Atlantic Ocean. To better understand this phenomenon, the ERC remOcean 1 project, led by researchers at the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche (CNRS/UPMC), has developed a new class of robots: biogeochemical profiling floats, the first robots able to collect data in the ocean throughout the year.

Researchers at EPFL have developed a system that can be installed in a building to collect data on people's energy usage. The aim is then to send this data directly to a smart electric grid that will allocate resources optimally. A smart grid that decides how best to distribute energy based on availability, cost and customers' needs - that's the energy concept being developed by researchers in the School of Engineering's Electronics Laboratory.

For the past 10 years, the Camera Culture group at MIT's Media Lab has been developing innovative imaging systems - from a camera that can see around corners to one that can read text in closed books - by using "time of flight," an approach that gauges distance by measuring the time it takes light projected into a scene to bounce back to a sensor.