Scientists Design Super-Light Carbon Nanostructure That's Stronger Than Diamond

 Scientists have found a brand new thanks to structure carbon at the nanoscale, making a fabric that's superior to diamond on the strength-to-density ratio.

While the small carbon lattice has been fabricated and tested within the lab, it is a very good distance of practical use. But this new approach could help us build stronger and lighter materials within the future - which are some things that are of great interest to industries like aerospace and aviation. 

What we're talking about here are some things called nanolattices - porous structures just like the one within the image above that's made from three-dimensional carbon struts and braces. thanks to their unique structure, they're incredibly strong and light-weight.

Usually, these nanolattices are based around a cylindrical framework (they're called beam-nanolattices). But the team has now created plate-nanolattices, structures based around tiny plates.

This subtle shift might not sound like much, but the researchers say it can make an enormous difference when it involves strength.

Based on early experiments and calculations, the plate approach promises a 639 percent increase in strength and a 522 percent increase in rigidity over the beam nanolattice approach.

"Scientists have predicted that nanolattices arranged during a plate-based design would be incredibly strong," says materials scientist Cameron Crook, from the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

"But the issue in manufacturing structures this manner meant that the speculation was never proven until we succeeded in doing it."

To finally test these materials within the lab, the researchers used a fancy 3D laser printing called two-photon polymerization direct laser writing, which essentially uses carefully managed chemical reactions inside a ray to etch out shapes at the tiniest of scales.

Using liquid resin sensitive to actinic radiation, the method shoots photons at the resin to show it into a solid polymer in an exceedingly particular shape. Additional steps are then required to get rid of excess resin and to heat up the structure to mend it in situ.

What the scientists have managed to try and do here actually comes near the utmost theoretical stiffness and strength of a fabric of this kind – limits called the Hashin-Shtrikman and Suquet upper bounds.

As confirmed by a scanning microscope, these are the primary actual experiments to indicate that those theoretical limits are often reached, though we're still a protracted way off having the ability to manufacture this material at a bigger scale.

In fact, a part of the material's strength lies in its tiny size: as objects like this get shrunk below 100 nanometres – one thousand times smaller than the thickness of a personality's hair – the pores and cracks in them get ever smaller, reducing potential flaws.

As for a way these nanolattices might eventually be used, they'll certainly be of interest to aerospace engineers – their combination of strength and denseness makes them ideal for aircraft and spacecraft.

"Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties," says engineer Jens Bauer, from UCI.

"This new class of plate-nanolattices that we've created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the simplest beam-nanolattices."

Solar Winds Hitting Earth Are Hotter Than They Should Be, And We May Finally Know Why

 Our planet is continually bathed within the winds coming off the blistering sphere at the center of our scheme. But while the Sun itself is so ridiculously hot, once the solar winds reach Earth, they're hotter than they must be - and that we might finally know why.

We know that particles making up the plasma of the Sun's heliosphere cool as they unfolded. the matter is that they appear to require their sweet time doing so, dropping in temperature far slower than models predict.

"People are studying the solar radiation since its discovery in 1959, but there are many important properties of this plasma which are still not well understood," says physicist Stas Boldyrev from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"Initially, researchers thought the solar radiation needs to calm down very rapidly because it expands from the Sun, but satellite measurements show that because it reaches the planet, its temperature is 10 times larger than expected."

The research team used laboratory equipment to review moving plasma, and now think the solution to the matter lies in a very trapped sea of electrons that just can't seem to flee the Sun's grip.

The expansion process itself has long been assumed to be subject to adiabatic laws, a term that simply means energy isn't added or off from a system. This keeps the numbers nice and easy, but assumes there aren't places where energy slips in or out of the flow of particles.

Unfortunately, an electron's journey is anything but simple, shoved around at the mercy of vast magnetic fields sort of a roller coaster from Hell. This chaos leaves many opportunities for warmth to be passed back and forth.

Just to complicate matters further, because of its tiny mass, electrons get an honest advantage over heavier ions as they shoot forth from the Sun's atmosphere, leaving a largely positive cloud of particles in their wake.

Eventually, the growing attraction between the 2 opposing charges takes over the inertia of these flying electrons, pulling them back to the start where magnetic fields another time play havoc with their paths.

"Such returning electrons are reflected so they stream aloof from the Sun, but again they can't escape thanks to the attractive electric force of the Sun," says Boldyrev.

"So, their destiny is to make a comeback and forth, creating an oversized population of so-called trapped electrons."

Boldyrev and his crew recognized the same game of electron ping-pong playing enter their own laboratory, inside an apparatus commonly wont to study plasma called a mirror machine.

Diagram of a mirror machine

A linear fusion reactor, or 'mirror machine'. (Cary Forest)

Mirror machines don't actually contain any mirrors. At least, not the familiar shiny kind. Also called magnetic mirrors or magnetic traps, these linear fusion devices are little quite long tubes with a bottle-neck at either end.

Their reflective nature is formed as streams of plasma passing through the bottle pinch in at either end, altering the encircling magnetic fields in such a way that particles within the stream reflect back inside again.

"But some particles can escape, and after they do, they stream along expanding field lines outside the bottle," Boldyrev says.

"Because the physicists want to stay this plasma very popular, they need to work out how the temperature of the electrons that escape the bottle declines outside this opening."

Or if you're Boldyrev and his team, those leaking electrons will be studied to higher understand what's happening with our very own solar radiation.

He and his colleagues suggest the population of trapped electrons that yo-yo back and forth play a serious role within the way electrons distributes their energy, changing the standard distributions of particle velocities and temperatures in predictable ways.

"It seems that our results agree o.k. with measurements of the temperature profile of the solar radiation and that they may explain why the electron temperature declines with space so slowly," says Boldyrev.

Finding such a decent match between the mirror machine's figures and what we see in space suggests there may be other solar phenomena worth studying this fashion.

This Genius New Type of Solar Energy Cell Can Be Used in Windows

 Engineers have developed a semi-transparent photovoltaic cell that provides a viable level of efficiency, and it'd get us closer to a future where windows that double up as solar panels could transform both architecture and energy production.

Two square meters (around 22 square feet) of the next-gen perovskite solar cells (PSCs) would be enough to come up with about the maximum amount electricity as a regular electrical device, in keeping with the most recent study – within the region of 140 watts per meter, if tinted to the identical degree as current glazed commercial windows.

Solar cell windows are something researchers are functioning on for years, but until now nobody has really hit the sweet spot in terms of efficiency, stability, and value. The team behind the new project says they're closer than ever to doing just that.

"Rooftop solar contains a conversion efficiency of between 15 and 20 percent," says materials chemist Jacek Jasieniak, from Monash University in Australia. "The semi-transparent cells have a conversion efficiency of 17 percent, while still transmitting over 10 percent of the incoming light so that they are right within the zone.

"It's long been a dream to own windows that generate electricity, and now that appears possible."

Central to the work is that the replacement of a key electric cell component (Spiro-OMeTAD to be technical) with a specially developed polymer, supported by an organic semiconductor, which increases overall stability.

That stability is crucial in the material that goes in the sunshine all day. Add the recent efficiency increases in PSCs and you'll see why this growing solar technology is becoming more and more commercially attractive.

However, you will not be able to gaze through a superbly clear window and obtain the utmost amount of energy efficiency from it – there's still a balance to be found between opacity and efficiency.

"There could be a trade-off," says Jasieniak. "The solar cells are made more, or less, transparent. The more transparent they're, the less electricity they generate so becomes something for architects to contemplate."

Even with this major breakthrough, it's going to be a while – maybe the maximum amount as 10 years – before the tech is commercialized and scaled up. The scientists are working with business partners to do and acquire the solar cells included in future building plans.

Multi-story buildings where glazing is already expensive are likely to be the primary beneficiaries, in keeping with the team, because the addition of photovoltaic cell technology won't cost a large amount extra (and remember the electricity savings).

Among the avenues that the researchers are now exploring is combining a layer of perovskite solar cells with a layer of organic solar cells (the more traditional type) to urge the advantages of both.

"These solar cells mean an enormous change to the way we predict about buildings and therefore the way they function," says Jasieniak.

"Up so far every building has been designed on the belief that windows are fundamentally passive. Now they're going to actively produce electricity."

Your Dreams Are More Complex Depending on What Stage of Sleep You're In, Study Finds

 The quality and complexity of dreams appear to vary with our stages of sleep, per a replacement analysis.

Before the twenty-first century, we accustomed think dreams only occurred during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but more modern research shows people sometimes recall dreams even once they are woken from non-REM stages of sleep. 

Whether these two kinds of dreaming are inherently different are a few things neuroscientists are still trying to work out.  

When patients are woken during slumber, research shows they'll usually recall elaborate, vivid, and emotional story-like dreams. In contrast, those woken during non-REM stages remember their dreams less, and also the dreams themselves tend to be more thought-like.

These are important findings, but they're also supported by subjective reports. REM dreams are often described in additional words, for example, but when the length of the outline is controlled for, differences in elaboration disappear or are highly diminished.

Researchers in Brazil have now developed a high-speed analyzing tool that may take these qualitative reports and display them in a very more objective graph form, taking under consideration biases for both length and language.

"We know REM dreams are longer and more like movies," says neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. 

"Automating the method of study, as we did within the study, made possible the first-ever quantitative measurement of this structural difference."

Compared to traditional methods, which depend on parsing out the meaning of words, this non-semantic graph analysis was able to instead target the general tone of what was said.

Focusing on 133 previously collected dream reports from 20 participants, who were woken at different stages of dreaming, researchers graphed out the words, replacing them with nodes on a graph.

Analyzing their structural organization, the new tool found REM dream reports were way more complex and filled with connected information compared to dreams during non-REM sleep.

And this was true no matter the report's length.

"This is that the first study to use graph theory to point out that REM dream reports have more structural connectedness than non-REM dream reports," says neuroscientist Joshua Martin from Humboldt University in Berlin.

"Not to depreciate the relevance of traditional methods, but these results are important because they show that computational methods may be applied to studies of dreaming."

While non-REM sleep is suspected of getting some restorative function, we're still not really sure why sleep exists. If dreaming during this stage is really of unique quality, as this new research suggests, then REM and non-REM dreaming may well be driven by distinct underlying mechanisms that might play differing roles in our biology. 

Compared to REM dreams, dreams from the N2 stage – a deep, non-REM, slow-wave sleep – were shorter, less frequently recalled, less intense, and more thought-like. 

Of course, sleep studies include many limitations beyond mere subjectivity. Being woken up continuously throughout the night could itself be impacting the standard of sleep among volunteers.

Recall of dreams may additionally be warped by sleep inertia – that weird stage between waking and sleeping – although dreams' narrative complexity appears to remain identical even once participants have woken up properly.

While complex dream narratives can still occur in non-REM sleep, the authors suspect the very physiology of REM sleep, which shows great cortical activity and muscle atonia, could be a better time for interactive narratives to unfold uninterrupted.

"In this sense, dream experiences that are coherent, immersive, and story-like could also be more easily organized into a report with larger connectedness, while dream experiences that are fragmented and isolated are relatively harder to prepare mentally and thus are structurally less connected," the authors explain. 

Not only do the results of the study complement existing literature on dream reports and sleep, but they also support recent and more objective measurements of dream bank databases. 

A study published in 2020, for example, used an algorithm to sift through 24,000 dreams and located various "statistical markers" that support the hypothesis that our dreams are a continuation of lifestyle.

One algorithm isn't enough to place this mystery to bed, but mathematical tools like this one may be useful when it involves assessing our sleep and our dreams with as little bias and with as many considered factors as possible.

The current study was conducted at a way smaller scale, but it offers a number of the primary really objective measurements on dreams that we have got.

Earth Is Vibrating Substantially Less Because There's So Little Activity Right Now

 Flights are grounded. Fewer trains are running. time of day is gone. the globe - particularly in cities - is looking drastically different during the continued coronavirus pandemic.

According to seismologists, that drastic reduction in human hustle and bustle is causing the planet to maneuver substantially less. the world is 'standing still'.

Thomas Lecocq, a geologist, and seismologist at the Royal Observatory in Belgium noticed that the country's capital Brussels is experiencing a 30 to 50 percent reduction in ambient seismic noise since the lockdowns began, as CNN reports.

That means data collected by seismologists is becoming more accurate, capable of detecting even the littlest tremors - despite the actual fact that a lot of the scientific instruments in use today are near city centers.

"You'll get a symbol with less noise on top, allowing you to squeeze a touch more information out of these events," Andy Frassetto, a seismologist at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology in Washington DC told Nature.

Researchers in la and in West London, UK noticed an identical trend.

But seismologists collecting data from remote stations distant from human civilization won't see a change the least bit, in keeping with Nature.

Regardless, a major come by seismic noise also shows that we're a minimum of doing one thing right during this pandemic: staying within the safety of our own homes as we anticipate the virus to run its course.

Astronomers Have Watched a Nova Go From Start to Finish For The First Time

A nova may be a dramatic episode within the lifetime of a binary pair of stars. It's an explosion of bright light that may last weeks or perhaps months. And though they are not exactly rare - there are about 10 every year within the galaxy - astronomers haven't watched one from start to end.

Until now.

A nova occurs in an exceedingly close binary system when one amongst the celebs has had its red giant star phase. That star leaves behind a remnant white dwarf star. When the star and its partner become close enough, the large gravitational pull of the white dwarf star draws material, mostly hydrogen, from the opposite star.

That hydrogen accretes onto the surface of the white dwarf star, forming a skinny atmosphere. The white dwarf star heats the hydrogen, and eventually, the pressure level is extremely high, and fusion is ignited. Not just any fusion: rapid, runaway fusion.

Artist's impression of a nova eruption, showing the star accreting matter from its companion. (Nova_by K. Ulaczyk, Warschau Universität Observatorium)

When the rapid fusion ignites, we will see the sunshine, and also the new hydrogen atmosphere is expelled aloof from the star into space. In the past, astronomers thought these new bright lights were new stars, and also the name "nova" stuck.

Astronomers now call these sorts of nova "classical" novae. (There also are recurrent novae, when the method repeats itself.)

This is an enormously energetic event, that produces not only light but gamma rays and x-rays too. the tip result's that some stars that would only be seen through a telescope are often seen with the oculus during a nova.

All of this is often widely accepted in astronomy and astrophysics. But much of it's theoretical.

Recently, astronomers using the BRITE (BRIght Target Explorer) constellation of nanosatellites were fortunate enough to look at the complete process from start to end, confirming the speculation.

BRITE could be a constellation of nanosatellites designed to "investigate stellar structure and evolution of the brightest stars within the sky and their interaction with the local environment," per the website.

They operate in low-Earth orbit and have few restrictions on the parts of the sky that they'll observe. BRITE may be a coordinated project between Austrian, Polish, and Canadian researchers.

This first-ever observation of a nova was pure chance. BRITE had spent several weeks observing 18 stars within the Carina constellation. One day, a brand new star appeared. BRITE Operations Manager Rainer Kuschnig found the nova during a daily inspection.

"Suddenly there was a star on our records that wasn't there the day before," he said in a very handout. "I'd never seen anything prefer it all together the years of the mission!"

Werner Weiss is from the Department of Astrophysics at the University of Vienna. in a very release, he emphasized the importance of this observation.

A shows bright V906 Carinae labeled with a white arrow. B and C show the star before and after the V906 Carinae nova. (A. Maury and J. Fabrega)

"But what causes a previously unimpressive start to explode? This was an issue that has not been solved satisfactorily so far," he said.

The explosion of Nova V906 within the constellation Carina is giving researchers some answers and has confirmed a number of the theoretical concept behind novae.

V906 Carinae was first spotted by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae. Fortunately, it appeared in a neighborhood of the sky that had been under observation by BRITE for weeks, therefore the data documenting the nova is in BRITE data.

"It is astounding that for the primary time a nova may be observed by our satellites even before its actual eruption and until many weeks later," says Otto Koudelka, project manager of the BRITE Austria (TUGSAT-1) satellite at TU Graz.

V906 Carinae is about 13,000 light-years away, therefore the event is already history. "After all, this nova is to date far from us that its light takes about 13,000 years to succeed in the planet," explains Weiss.

The BRITE team reported their findings during a new paper. The paper is titled "Direct evidence for shock-powered optical emission in a very nova." It's published within the journal Nature Astronomy. First author is Elias Aydi from Michigan State University.

"This fortunate circumstance was decisive in ensuring that the nova event can be recorded with unprecedented precision," explains Konstanze Zwintz, head of the BRITE Science Team, from the Institute for Astro- and physical science at the University of Innsbruck.

Zwintz immediately realized "that we had access to observation material that was unique worldwide," consistent with an announcement.

Novae like V906 Carinae are thermonuclear explosions on the surface of white dwarf star stars. For a protracted time, astrophysicists thought that a nova's luminosity is powered by continual nuclear burning after the initial burst of runaway fusion. But the info from BRITE suggests something different.

In the new paper, the authors show that shocks play a bigger role than thought. The authors say that "shocks internal to the nova ejecta may dominate the nova emission."

These shocks may be involved in other events like supernovae, stellar mergers, and tidal disruption events, in step with the authors. But up yet, there's been a scarcity of observational evidence.

"Here we report simultaneous space-based optical and gamma-ray observations of the 2018 nova V906 Carinae (ASASSN-18fv), revealing a stimulating series of distinct correlated flares in both bands," the researchers write.

Since those flares occur at the identical time, it implies a standard origin in shocks.

"During the flares, the nova luminosity doubles, implying that the majority of the luminosity is shock powered." So instead of continual nuclear burning, novae are driven by shocks.

"Our data, spanning the spectrum from radio to gamma-ray, provide evidence that shocks can power substantial luminosity in classical novae and other optical transients." 

In broader terms, shocks are shown to play some role in events like novae. But that understanding is basically supported by studying timescales and luminosities. This study is that the first direct observation of such shocks, and is probably going only the start of observing and understanding the role that shocks play.

In the conclusion of their paper, the authors write: "Our observations of nova V906 Car definitively demonstrate that substantial luminosity may be produced - and emerge at optical wavelengths - by heavily absorbed, energetic shocks in explosive transients."

They go on to mention that: "With modern time-domain surveys like ASAS-SN, the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and also the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, we'll be discovering more - and better luminosity - transients than ever before. The novae in our galactic backyard will remain critical for testing the physical drivers powering these distant, exotic events."

Mesmerising Video Shows The View if You Could See Earth And The Moon at The Same Time

 As humans stuck on an orbiting planet, we're somewhat limited by our point of view. Looking up at the night sky, we can see our closest neighbor, the Moon, shining back at us, but have you ever wondered what we must look like from our satellite?

Planetary scientist James O'Donoghue has now held up a mirror for us all to see the truth.

Using real NASA imagery and positional data along with lunar topography imagery, the former NASA employee has created a computer-generated, high-resolution video of what Earth looks like from the Moon, while also showing us what the Moon looks like from Earth at the same time.

With every frame of the video representing 15 minutes of actual time, the final product encompasses the entire month of April 2020 (in CGI form, at least), and allows us a cosmic perspective the likes of which we've never seen before.

Dr James O'Donoghue

✔@physicsJ

Made in isolation, depicting isolation. Here's how Earth looks from the Moon & how Moon looks from Earth, April 2020: showing accurate phases and rotations. CGI based on real NASA imagery, lunar topography (exaggerated for fun), using NASA data (see it 4K

https://

youtu.be/eV1ZXm3MH6I

 

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O'Donoghue further explained that while the video might look real, it was just based on some graphics he'd seen, and said his goal was to show the phases, rotations, angles, and size changes.

On Twitter, O'Donoghue also mentioned he'd been approached about writing a book, but admitted he'd been spending most of his free time simply making new animations.

When they look at this amazing, we don't mind at all.