Engineers have created a thin film that can generate millivolts of electricity from ambient air humidity thanks to water’s ‘mean free path.’
Da-kuk/iStock.
However, there’s one challenge they still face: understanding the materials they interact with.
Self-described mixed reality nerd, Brad Lynch, has tweeted out several interesting details about Apple’s yet-to-be announced VR/AR headset. He has managed to compile information from several sources — mostly reports produced by hardware analysts based in China. His summation of the leaked info states: “The Apple HMD’s Bill of Materials (BoM) cost to be about $1500–1600 (USD). This is about double the reported BoM for the (Meta) Quest Pro (which was 800 dollars including the controllers and charging pad).”
Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy.
Experiments that imitate solid materials with light waves reveal the quantum basis of exotic physical effects.
In the three-dimensional printing process of ceramic with low-angle structures, additional supporting structures are usually employed to avoid collapse of overhanging parts. However, the extra supporting structures not only affect printing efficiency, but the problems caused by their removal are also a matter of concern. Herein, we present a ceramic printing method, which can realize printing of unsupported multi-scale and large-span ceramics through the combination of direct ink writing and near-infrared induced up-conversion particles-assisted photopolymerization. This printing technology enables in-situ curing of multi-scale filaments with diameters ranging from 410 µm to 3.50 mm, and ceramic structures of torsion spring, three-dimensional bending and cantilever beam were successfully constructed through unsupported printing. This method will bring more innovation to the unsupported 3D manufacturing of complex shape ceramics.
In 3D ceramic printing, the need for additional supports can increase processing time and introduce defects during post-processing removal. Here, authors merge direct ink writing and up-conversion particles-assisted photopolymerization under near-infrared irradiation for support-free printing with controlled curing rates reducing material waste, printing time, and post-processing steps.
Meeting the world’s energy demands is reaching a critical point. Powering the technological age has caused issues globally. It is increasingly important to create superconductors that can operate at ambient pressure and temperature. This would go a long way toward solving the energy crisis.
Advancements with superconductivity hinge on advances in quantum materials. When electrons inside of quantum materials undergo a phase transition, the electrons can form intricate patterns, such as fractals. A fractal is a never-ending pattern. When zooming in on a fractal, the image looks the same. Commonly seen fractals can be a tree or frost on a windowpane in winter. Fractals can form in two dimensions, like the frost on a window, or in three-dimensional space like the limbs of a tree.
Dr. Erica Carlson, a 150th Anniversary Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Purdue University, led a team that developed theoretical techniques for characterizing the fractal shapes that these electrons make, in order to uncover the underlying physics driving the patterns.
Graphene, by all metrics, is a revolutionary material producing some unbelievable results. Avadain has developed a patented breakthrough technology for producing industrial volumes of large, thin, and nearly defect-free graphene flakes, addressing the $100B market demand for this revolutionary material.
An unusual quasicrystal has been discovered by a team from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the University of Sheffield and Xi’an Jiaotong University. It has a dodecagonal honeycomb structure that has never been seen before. Until now, similar quasicrystals were only known to come in a solid—not liquid—form. The team presents its results in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Quasicrystals have a special structure. They have a regular pattern similar to normal crystals, however, in normal crystals, the arrangement of the individual components is repeated over and over at regular intervals. In the case of quasicrystals, the components do not fit together in such a periodic pattern. This special structure gives them special properties that normal crystals do not have.
The newly discovered quasicrystal consists of dodecagons, which in turn are made up of a mixture of triangular, square and, for the first time, trapezoidal shaped cells. These are generated from the self-assembly of “T-shaped” molecules. “We have discovered a perfectly ordered liquid quasicrystal. Such a material has never been seen before,” says chemist Professor Carsten Tschierske at MLU.
In a study published in Nature Communications, Prof. Xiang Bin’s group from University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Wang Zhi from Sun Yat-sen University, discovered the long-range skin Josephson supercurrent across a van der Waals ferromagnet.
They bridged two spin-singlet superconductors NbSe2 (S) by constructing the van der Waals ferromagnet metal Fe3GeTe2 (F), and observed long-range supercurrent in the lateral Josephson junction (S/F/S) for the first time, which exhibits astonishing skin characteristics.
Ferromagnetism and superconductivity are two antagonistic macroscopic orderings. When the singlet supercurrent enters the ferromagnet, rapid decoherence of the Cooper pairs will be triggered.
