Lifeboat Foundation

Tiny sensors made through nanoscale 3D printing may be the basis for the next generation of atomic force microscopes. These nanosensors can enhance the microscopes’ sensitivity and detection speed by miniaturizing their detection component up to 100 times. The sensors were used in a real-world application for the first time at EPFL, and the results are published in Nature Communications.

The sensor is made up of highly conductive platinum nanoparticles surrounded by an insulating carbon matrix. (Image: EPFL)

Researchers from the Graphene Flagship use layered materials to create an all-electrical quantum light emitting diodes (LED) with single-photon emission. These LEDs have potential as on-chip photon sources in quantum information applications.

Atomically thin LEDs emitting one photon at a time have been developed by researchers from the Graphene Flagship. Constructed of layers of atomically thin materials, including transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), graphene, and boron nitride, the ultra-thin LEDs showing all-electrical single photon generation could be excellent on-chip quantum light sources for a wide range of photonics applications for quantum communications and networks. The research, reported in Nature Communications, was led by the University of Cambridge, UK.

The ultra-thin devices reported in the paper are constructed of thin layers of different layered materials, stacked together to form a heterostructure. Electrical current is injected into the device, tunnelling from single-layer graphene, through few-layer boron nitride acting as a tunnel barrier, and into the mono- or bi-layer TMD material, such as tungsten diselenide (WSe2), where electrons recombine with holes to emit single photons. At high currents, this recombination occurs across the whole surface of the device, while at low currents, the quantum behaviour is apparent and the recombination is concentrated in highly localised quantum emitters.

Google said that one of its self-driving cars was involved in an accident in Mountain View, California last week. The accident was first reported Friday by 9to5 Google, which characterized the incident as Google’s “worst accident yet.”

In a statement, Google insisted its driverless car was not at fault. A crash report with the DMV has yet to be posted, so all the details have yet to be confirmed.

According to the Google, the accident occurred when a vehicle heading west on El Camino Real in Mountain View ran a red light and collided with the right side of a Google self-driving vehicle that was traveling northbound on Phyllis Ave. “Our light was green for at least six seconds before our car entered the intersection,” a spokesperson said.

Continue reading “Google’s ‘worst’ self-driving accident was still a human’s fault” »

Jupiter’s moon Europa — a giant ice ball thought to hide twice as much liquid water as there is on Earth — just became an even hotter target in the search for aliens.

Scientists on Monday unveiled new photographs from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, and they likely show ‘fingers’ of water vapour squirting out of Europa’s hidden ocean and into space.

The grainy Hubble photos, taken in 2014, suggest water plumes occasionally shoot 125 miles (200 km) into space, then rain back down on the surface. If true, this would be Hubble’s second time catching Europa’s water plumes since 2012.

Continue reading “Hubble might have just caught jets of water squirting out of Europa” »

At 500 meters across—over 1,600 feet—the FAST project will gather data on the far reaches of the universe.

How do we get our scientists to overcome social prejudice and give the public the truth?

Professor Peter Wadhams says peers are failing in their duty through timidity, and warns China is planning huge land grabs as warming hits crop production2.

To physics, time has no direction. Until you come along and give it a past, present, and future.

Small cubes with no exterior moving parts can propel themselves forward, jump on top of each other, and snap together to form arbitrary shapes. Watch Video

Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office October 4, 2013.

The combination of graphene nanoribbons made with a process developed at Rice University and a common polymer could someday be of critical importance to healing damaged spinal cords in people, according to Rice chemist James Tour.

The Tour lab has spent a decade working with graphene nanoribbons, starting with the discovery of a chemical process to “unzip” them from multiwalled carbon nanotubes, as revealed in a Nature paper in 2009. Since then, the researchers have used them to enhance materials for the likes of deicers for airplane wings, better batteries and less-permeable containers for natural gas storage.

Now their work to develop nanoribbons for medical applications has resulted in a material dubbed Texas-PEG that may help knit damaged or even severed spinal cords.