Enjoy our special posts in the fields of Earth & Planetary Sciences (EPS Blog) and Social Sciences & Arts (SSA Blog)
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As technologies keep advancing at exponential rates and demand for new devices rises accordingly, miniaturizing systems into chips has become increasingly important. Microelectronics has changed the way electricity is manipulated, enabling sophisticated electronic products that are now an essential part of our daily lives.
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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Christmas Day 2021, is already transforming our understanding of planets in our Solar System and far beyond. A versatile satellite observatory, JWST has a clear-eyed view from its orbital position, 1.5m km away from Earth in space. This gives it a major advantage over ground-based telescopes which must peer out to space through Earth's hazy atmosphere.
JWST collects five times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), allowing it to detect faint signals from distant worlds using its spectroscopic capabilities.
'Before the James Webb Space Telescope, only a very small number of molecules could be observed, such as water, carbon monoxide and sodium,' said Jérémy Leconte, astrophysicist at the University of Bordeaux in France.
Previous missions and observations from Earth have discovered thousands of exoplanets (those outside our Solar System) and astronomers are already taking advantage of JWST's unique capabilities to study the building blocks of life in the Universe.
Credit: Nanostructures built using software that lets researchers design objects out of DNA. Models (top) with electron microscope images of the objects (bottom); Raghu Pradeep Narayanan and Abhay Prasad, Yan lab, Arizona State University
Look at the tiny nanoscale structures emerging from research labs at Duke University and Arizona State University, and it's easy to imagine you're browsing a catalog of the world's smallest pottery.
A new paper reveals some of these creations: itty-bitty vases, bowls and hollow spheres, one hidden inside the other, like housewares for a Russian nesting doll.
But instead of making them from wood or clay, the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported team of researchers designed these objects out of threadlike molecules of DNA, bent and folded into complex 3D objects with nanometer precision.
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In a Swiss classroom, two children are engrossed in navigating an intricate maze with the help of a small, rather cute, robot. The interaction is easy and playful – it is also providing researchers with valuable information on how children learn and the conditions in which information is most effectively absorbed.
Rapid improvements in intuitive human-machine interactions (HMI) are poised to kick off big changes in society. In particular, two European research projects give a sense of how these trends could influence two core areas: education and healthcare.
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Researchers at Princeton University have found a way to turn a common breakfast food into a new material that can cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater.
The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many applications, including water filtration, energy storage and sound and thermal insulation.
The research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation through a grant to the Princeton Center for Complex Materials. The results of the research are published in Materials Today.
