Team of researchers from Columbia University, Seoul National University and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science have
The post Scientists light up graphene – world’s thinnes light bulb is one atom thick has been published on Technology Org.
Once upon a time, I worked at a research institute that was, for the most part, devoted to nuclear fusion. Although I was never involved myself, two things impressed me about the research. The first was the pure difficulty facing researchers: there are material, plasma physics, and control system issues that are enormously challenging. And, yet, progress is made—I am now, and will forever be, impressed by the achievements that I saw during my short stay among the fusion researchers.
On the other hand, I was also impressed (and not in a good way) by how locked in certain decisions were. This is a natural consequence of doing science that has an enormous infrastructure—once a facility is built, some decisions simply cannot be unmade. These constraints, understandable as they are, make me fear for the eventual success of tokamak fusion. I would rather researchers were given more money so that they had more flexibility in terms of repurposing facilities to try new avenues of research.
Given these thoughts, you would think that I would be enthusiastic about alternative fusion schemes. Yet, because I am vaguely aware of the challenges, and how robustly they are being addressed, I tend to greet alternative fusion schemes with some skepticism. So, it is with some interest and a bit of trepidation that I started examining new research on the Polywell fusion concept, where a group claims to have achieved grand new things in terms of plasma confinement.
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It’s difficult enough to see things in the dark, but what if you also had to hover in
The post How the hawkmoth sees, hovers and tracks flowers in the dark has been published on Technology Org.
If you want to understand how novel phases emerge in correlated materials, including high-temperature superconductivity and nanoscale electronic
The post A Bright Light for Ultrafast Snapshots of Materials has been published on Technology Org.
An upgraded Insertable B-Layer (IBL) was added to the inner detector of the ATLAS experiment during CERN's long shutdown last year (Image: Claudia Marcelloni/ATLAS)
In Particular, a new podcast from particle physicists Tova Holmes and Laura Jeanty, brings you right to the heart of the ATLAS collaboration at CERN.
Through interviews with researchers from all over the world, the podcast takes a very human look at what it's like to be a particle physicist, giving listeners a feel for what is it actually like to do science day to day in a large collaboration.
The hosts, who both work on ATLAS projects at CERN with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US, met while they both studied at Harvard, and these days sit next to each other at work. They are joined on the podcast by Zachary Marshall, also from Berkeley, and Larry Lee, from the University of Adelaide.
"A lot of the time, talk with our colleagues is about the everyday details of our work, and isn't necessarily related to why we got into it in the first place," says Jeanty, whose work focuses on two subdetectors on the ATLAS experiment: The pixel detector, and the Insertable B-Layer (IBL). "For me, doing the podcast is a fun way of exploring the more exciting and more human aspects of our work."
"It's occasionally something you might be afraid to do – to talk about the feelings you have about the work we do," says Holmes, who is conducting a supersymmetry analysis on ATLAS data. "Having a podcast is almost an excuse – it makes it easier to ask people those questions."
The first episode of In particular covers what ATLAS physicists, as people, would most like to see in new data from Run 2 of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The second explores how this collaboration prepared their experiment for the LHC's run at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV). With many more episodes planned, and interviews dusted for at least the next three, there's plenty more to listen to.
Check out the podcast over at inparticular.web.cern.ch
On June 30 Venus and Jupiter were actually far apart, but both appeared close in western skies at dusk. Near the culmination of this year's gorgeous conjunction, the two bright evening planets are captured in the same telescopic field of view in this sharp digital stack of images taken after sunset from Poznań in west-central Poland. In fact, banded gas giant Jupiter was about 910 million kilometers from Poland. That's over 11 times farther than crescent Venus, only 78 million kilometers distant at the time. But since the diameter of giant planet Jupiter is over 11 times larger than Venus both planets show about the same angular size. Of course, 16th century Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus would also have enjoyed the simultaneous telescopic view including Jupiter's four Galilean moons and a crescent Venus. Observations of Jupiter's moons and Venus' crescent phase were evidence for the Copernican or heliocentric model of the solar system.
This image, based on housekeeping data from ESA’s Gaia satellite, is no ordinary depiction of the heavens. While the image portrays the outline of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, and of its neighbouring Magellanic Clouds, it was obtained in a rather unusual way.
The world’s first spacecraft thruster with a platinum combustion chamber and nozzle made by 3D printing has passed
The post Hot firing of world’s first 3D-printed platinum thruster chamber has been published on Technology Org.
