Lifeboat Foundation

In a study published in Device (“Self-powered electrostatic tweezer for adaptive object manipulation”), a research team led by Dr. DU Xuemin from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has reported a new self-powered electrostatic tweezer that offers superior accumulation and tunability of triboelectric charges, enabling unprecedented flexibility and adaptability for manipulating objects in various working scenarios.

The ability to manipulate objects using physical tweezers is essential in fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology. However, conventional tweezers often require complex electrode arrays and external power sources, have limited charge-generation capabilities, or produce undesirable temperature rises.

The newly proposed self-powered electrostatic tweezer (SET) features a polyvinylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE))-based self-powered electrode (SE) that generates large and tunable surface charge density through the triboelectric effect, along with a dielectric substrate that functions as both a tribo-counter material and a supportive platform, and a slippery surface to reduce resistance and biofouling during object manipulation.

“Kepler contributed many historical benchmarks in astronomy and physics in the 17th century, leaving his legacy even in the space age,” said Hisashi Hayakawa.

How can 400-year-old sunspot drawings help modern-day scientists with solar cycles? This is what a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters hopes to address as an international team of researchers used 400-year-old drawings of sunspots to better understand solar cycles and how we can study them in the future. This study holds the potential to help researchers use non-electronic scientific tools to gain greater insight into scientific discoveries around the world.

For the study, the researchers examined drawings of sunspots made by Johannes Kepler in 1,607 along with past notes to ascertain which solar cycle these sunspots belonged to, which could help astronomers piece together solar cycles during that time and predict them, as well.

Continue reading “17th Century Sunspot Drawings Could Help Solve 400-Year-Old Solar Cycle Mystery” »

A team of astrophysicists led by Caltech has managed for the first time to simulate the journey of primordial gas dating from the early universe to the stage at which it becomes swept up in a disk of material fueling a single supermassive black hole. The new computer simulation upends ideas about such disks that astronomers have held since the 1970s and paves the way for new discoveries about how black holes and galaxies grow and evolve.

“Our new simulation marks the culmination of several years of work from two large collaborations started here at Caltech,” says Phil Hopkins, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics.

The first collaboration, nicknamed has focused on the larger scales in the universe, studying questions such as how galaxies form and what happens when galaxies collide. The other, dubbed STARFORGE, was designed to examine much smaller scales, including how stars form in individual clouds of gas.

Having solved a central mystery about the “twirliness” of tornadoes and other types of vortices, William Irvine has set his sights on turbulence, the white whale of classical physics.

Starting with the direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, scientists have relied on a bit of a kludge: they can only detect those waves that match theoretical predictions, which is rather the opposite way that science is usually done.

In a paper in Physical Review Letters scientists from the department Living Matter Physics at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS) propose a mechanism on how energy barriers in complex systems can be overcome. These findings can help to engineer molecular machines and to understand the self-organization of active matter.

When seawater gets cold, it gets viscous. This fact could explain how single-celled ocean creatures became multicellular when the planet was frozen during “Snowball Earth,” according to experiments.

If you make a material thinner and thinner, at a certain point it undergoes a seemingly miraculous transformation: A two-dimensional material that consists of only one or two layers of molecules sometimes has completely different properties than the same material when it is thicker.

In previous research, measurements found that for fast rotations, for example in nuclei like neon-20 or chromium-48, the energy for spinning changes unexpectedly. Scientists attributed this to an anomalous increase in the moment of inertia for fast rotations, likely due to the nuclear matter bulging out. Earlier models suggested that fast-rotating nuclei ultimately become spheres, but newer models have found deformed shapes. Now, large-scale simulations of atomic nuclei have revealed surprising new explanations of the elusive physics of fast-spinning nuclei.

For the first time in nearly 50 years, scientists accurately calculated the moment of inertia and studied its hypothesized anomalous increase through state-of-the-art simulations of nuclei. The simulations for neon-20 replicate the energy measurements. Remarkably, however, the simulations do not find the anomalous increase. Instead, they reveal a change in the interior of the nucleus.

Similar microscopic simulations for chromium-48 confirm this surprising result. Furthermore, the results resolve the long-lasting question of whether a prolate nucleus that starts to quickly spin becomes spherical or oblate. This research, published in Physical Review C, shows that several competing shapes emerge, some prolate and some oblate, which on average appear spherical.