Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers continue to expand the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea proposes that a fragmented comet smashed into the Earth’s atmosphere 12,800 years ago, causing a widespread climatic shift that, among other things, led to the abrupt reversal of the Earth’s warming trend and into an anomalous near-glacial period called the Younger Dryas.

Now, UC Santa Barbara emeritus professor James Kennett and colleagues report the presence of proxies associated with the cosmic airburst distributed over several separate sites in the eastern United States (New Jersey, Maryland and South Carolina), materials indicative of the force and temperature involved in such an event, including platinum, microspherules, meltglass and shock-fractured quartz. The study appears in the journal Airbursts and Cratering.

“What we’ve found is that the pressures and temperatures were not characteristic of major crater-forming impacts but were consistent with so-called ‘touchdown’ airbursts that don’t form much in the way of craters,” Kennett said.

Advanced Materials, one of the world’s most prestigious journals, is the home of choice for best-in-class materials science for more than 30 years.

10 fins harvest over liter daily:

Using a commercially available coating material and copper, US researchers have designed a water harvester that works even in desert-like conditions.

In an effort to make them useless to poachers, researchers are implanting radioactive isotopes into the horns of rhinos in South Africa.

The unusual material would “render the horn useless… essentially poisonous for human consumption,” James Larkin, professor and dean of science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told Agence France-Presse.

The isotopes would also be “strong enough to set off detectors that are installed globally,” Larkin added, referring to hardware that was originally installed to “prevent nuclear terrorism.”

The team wondered if they could somehow leverage crystalline structures to identify a perfect candidate, sans building thousands of them in a lab.

The researchers were mostly on the lookout for 3D crystals with the right structural and electronic properties, so they could be “exfoliated.” 2D materials like graphene were extracted using this process from 3D.

Continue reading “Engineers create world’s thinnest wire stable at 0 Kelvin” »

Scientific Reports — Impact of device scaling on the electrical properties of MoS2 field-effect transistors.

Logic operations and reconfigurable circuits are demonstrated that can be directly implemented using memory elements based on floating-gate field-effect transistors with monolayer MoS2 as the active channel material.

Since the most advanced nodes in silicon are reaching the limits of planar integration, 2D materials could help to advance the semiconductor industry. With the potential for use in multifunctional chips, 2D materials offer combined logic, memory and sensing in integrated 3D chips.

Independent control of the electric field and charge-carrier density in double-gated graphene allows the decoupling of proton transport and lattice hydrogenation, enabling both accelerated proton transport and proton-based logic operations.