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Category: materials

Scientists Find Evidence Earth Is Drifting Through the Ashes of an Exploded Star

Earth is flying through the radioactive ashes of an ancient exploded star, and Antarctic ice preserved the evidence.

Scientists have found new evidence that Earth is moving through a cloud of ancient supernova debris left behind by a long ago stellar explosion. By examining Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old, researchers detected iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope created when massive stars explode. The findings suggest that the Local Interstellar Cloud surrounding our Solar System contains lingering material from an ancient supernova. The study was led by an international team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and published in Physical Review Letters.

Ancient Supernova Material Reaching Earth.

Garment humanoid robots, Zhejiang Humanoid lands order

Zhejiang Humanoid Robotics Innovation Center said on May 12 that it has signed a strategic partnership with Jack Technology and an order for 2,000 garment humanoid robots customized for garment manufacturing. According to Gasgoo, the company described the deal as the first mass deployment of humanoid robots in the global apparel industry. The announcement matters because garment handling combines flexible materials, tight tolerances, and repetitive production steps that have been difficult to automate with general purpose humanoids.

Garment humanoid robots face a hard manufacturing test

The source article frames apparel production as a demanding proving ground for embodied AI systems. Fabrics vary in material and shape, and they can wrinkle, shift, and deform during handling. Zhejiang Humanoid said alignment deviations for cut pieces such as collars and pockets must be kept within plus or minus 2 mm, while cutting and sewing tasks require motion precision of 0.3 to 0.5 mm.

A Solid-State Pathway to Neutrino Mass

New density-functional-theory calculations describe the radioactive decay of tritium bound to graphene, offering a way to model experiments that could open cleaner windows onto neutrino mass.

The discovery that neutrinos oscillate—shifting among three “flavors” (electron, muon, and tau) as they propagate—showed that these elusive particles must have mass. Yet their absolute mass scale and the mass ordering (whether the lightest neutrino state is predominantly electron-, muon-, or tau-like) remain unknown. Determining these properties is a central goal of modern particle physics. A promising approach involves measuring the energy spectrum of electrons emitted in nuclear decay, particularly from tritium: Because the neutrino carries away part of the decay energy, a nonzero neutrino mass slightly modifies the spectrum of emitted electrons. Precision experiments such as KATRIN have pushed this method to its limit, setting an upper bound of about 0.45 eV on the neutrino mass [1]. While KATRIN uses molecular tritium gas, new strategies aim to go further by embedding tritium in engineered materials.

Tiny forces, big effects: How particle interactions control the flow of soft materials

Sitting in a restaurant, you reach for the ketchup bottle, eyeing the basket of fries in front of you. You give the bottle a shake, then a tap. For a moment, nothing happens—the ketchup clings stubbornly to the glass. Then, all at once, it lets go and rushes out, sometimes in a steady stream, sometimes in a messy surge that threatens to flood the basket.

That awkward moment when ketchup stops behaving like a solid and suddenly starts flowing like a liquid is called “yielding.” Scientists see the same kind of behavior in many everyday and advanced materials, from toothpaste, paints and concrete to 3D-printing inks and electrodes used in next-generation batteries. Yet, what actually causes a material to hold its shape one moment and suddenly let go the next has been surprisingly hard to pin down, especially deep inside dense, opaque fluids where particle motion is difficult to see.

A new approach to cancer vaccination yields more powerful T cells

MIT engineers have developed a new way to amplify the T-cell response to mRNA vaccines—an advance that could lead to much more powerful cancer vaccines and stronger protection against infectious diseases.

Most vaccines generate both antibodies and T cells that can target the vaccine antigen by activating antigen-presenting cells, such as dendritic cells. In this study, the researchers boosted the T-cell response with a new type of vaccine adjuvant (a material that can help stimulate the immune system). The new adjuvant consists of mRNA molecules encoding genes that turn on immune signaling pathways and promote a supercharged T-cell response.

In studies in mice, this mRNA-encoded adjuvant enabled the immune system to completely eradicate most tumors, either on its own or delivered along with a tumor antigen. The adjuvant also boosted the T-cell response to vaccines against influenza and COVID-19.

80 years after the Trinity nuclear test, scientists identify new molecule-trapping crystal formed in the blast

Matter behaves strangely under extreme conditions, and often, remnants of these behaviors are left behind even when conditions return to normal. The Trinity nuclear test in 1945 left behind such remnants, and now, 80 years after the explosion, researchers have identified another unique example of what happens when various materials are heated to temperatures exceeding 1,500 °C (2,730 °F) and put under pressures tens of thousands of times atmospheric pressure.

The team describes a clathrate compound never before found among nuclear-explosion products in their new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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