How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my research would eventually lead me to ask a question about the origin of Earth-like planets. Yet that is exactly where it brought me.
For decades, planetary scientists have believed that the early solar system was enriched with short-lived radioactive elements—such as aluminum-26—by a nearby supernova. These radioactive elements played a crucial role in forming water-depleted rocky planets such as Earth. Their decay heated young planetesimals, causing them to lose much of their originally accreted water and other volatile materials.
There was just one problem that kept bothering me.
A research team affiliated with UNIST has introduced a technology that generates electricity from raindrops striking rooftops, offering a self-powered approach to automated drainage control and flood warning during heavy rainfall.
Led by Professor Young-Bin Park of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UNIST, the team developed a droplet-based electricity generator (DEG) using carbon fiber-reinforced polymer (CFRP). This device, called the superhydrophobic fiber-reinforced polymer (S-FRP-DEG), converts the impact of falling rain into electrical signals capable of operating stormwater management systems without an external power source. The findings are published in Advanced Functional Materials.
CFRP composites are lightweight, yet durable, and are used in a variety of applications, such as aerospace and construction because of their strength and resistance to corrosion. Such characteristics make it well suited for long-term outdoor installation on rooftops and other exposed urban structures.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an optical computing framework that performs large-scale nonlinear computations using linear materials.
Reported in eLight, the study demonstrates that diffractive optical processors—thin, passive material structures composed of phase-only layers—can compute numerous nonlinear functions simultaneously, executed rapidly at extreme parallelism and spatial density, bound by the diffraction limit of light.
Nonlinear operations underpin nearly all modern information-processing tasks, from machine learning and pattern recognition to general-purpose computing. Yet, implementing such operations optically has remained a challenge, as most nonlinear optical effects are weak, power-hungry, or slow.
Superconductors are materials that allow electrical current to flow without any resistance, a property that typically appears only at extremely low temperatures. While most known superconductors follow established theoretical frameworks, strontium ruthenate, Sr₂RuO₄, has remained difficult to explain since researchers first identified its superconducting behavior in 1994.
The material is widely regarded as one of the purest and most thoroughly examined examples of unconventional superconductivity. Even so, scientists have not reached agreement on the exact nature of the electron pairing within Sr₂RuO₄, including its symmetry and internal structure, which are central to understanding how its superconductivity arises.
Researchers have generated high-quality atom diffraction data from graphene, which could lead to new ways to measure surface interactions.
A beam of neutral atoms striking a material can produce a diffraction pattern that is sensitive to short-range interactions between the atoms and the surface. Building on recent developments, Pierre Guichard from the University of Strasbourg in France and collaborators have now used a fast hydrogen beam to probe single-layer graphene, producing the sharpest graphene diffraction patterns to date [1].
Early atom diffraction experiments predominantly looked at reflection, because atoms transmitted through a material tend to lose their wave-like coherence. Recently, however, transmitted atoms were shown to produce a diffraction pattern from single-layer graphene [2]. The trick was to use fast atoms that traverse the target quickly, minimizing coherence-destroying interactions.
Properties that remain unchanged when materials are stretched or bent, which are broadly referred to as topological properties, can contribute to the emergence of unusual physical effects in specific systems.
Over the past few years, many physicists have been investigating the physical effects emerging from the topology of non-Hermitian systems, open systems that exchange energy with their surroundings.
Researchers at Nanyang Technological University and the Australian National University set out to probe non-Hermitian topological phenomena in systems comprised of light and matter particles that strongly interact with each other.
Complex fluids, such as polymer melts and concentrated suspensions, are foundational materials for industrial products, including high-strength plastics and optical components. The final performance of these materials depends on their composition and internal microscopic structure. During manufacturing processes, however, fluids are subjected to mechanical forces that introduce internal stress, leading to microscopic structural damage, which in turn affects the material’s functionality.
Despite the pressing need to observe and control this structure–stress relationship, few measurement techniques are available for fluids subjected to uniaxially extensional flow. Conventional optical techniques, owing to their low resolution and scope, fail to accurately track changes in the region of maximum stress, making it difficult to link mechanical stresses with observable optical changes.
Addressing this challenge, a research team from Nagoya Institute of Technology (NITech) in Japan, led by Assistant Professor Masakazu Muto recently developed a novel rheo-optical technique that can accurately characterize structural deformations in a complex fluid under extensional flow. Collaborators included Mr. Naoki Kako, Mr. Tatsuya Yoshino, and Professor Shinji Tamano.
NIMS, in joint research with the University of Tokyo, AIST, the University of Osaka, and Tohoku University, have proposed a novel method for actively controlling heat flow in solids by utilizing the transport of magnons—quasiparticles corresponding to the collective motion of spins in a magnetic material—and demonstrated that magnons contribute to heat conduction in a ferromagnetic metal and its junction more significantly than previously believed.
The creation of new principles “magnon engineering” for modulating thermal transport using magnetic materials is expected to lead to the development of thermal management technologies. This research result is published in Advanced Functional Materials.
Thermal conductivity is a fundamental parameter characterizing heat conduction in a solid. The primary heat carriers are known to be electrons and phonons, quasiparticles corresponding to lattice vibrations. In current thermal engineering, efforts are underway to modulate thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal resistance by elucidating and controlling the transport properties of heat carriers. In particular, heat conduction modulation focusing on the transport and scattering of phonons has been actively studied over the past decades as “phonon engineering.”