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A well-known mineral is once again the center of attention thanks to applications in electronics: the Vienna University of Technology shows that mica still possesses some surprises.

At first glance, mica appears to be quite ordinary: it is a prevalent mineral found in materials like granite and has undergone extensive examination from geological, chemical, and technical standpoints.

At first, it may seem that there’s nothing groundbreaking that can be uncovered about such a commonplace material. However, a team from the Vienna University of Technology has recently published a study in Nature Communications.

Vibrations are the main drivers of a mysterious process in which a liquid flow generates an electric current in the solid below it.

Liquid flowing over a conducting surface is known to produce electric currents, but the mechanism behind this effect has been unclear. New experiments with a single liquid drop dragged over a graphene surface demonstrate that viscous forces at the liquid–solid interface create vibrations, or phonons, in the graphene sheet that drag electrons in the direction of the flow [1]. The researchers verified this “phonon wind” interpretation by observing multiple liquids and by testing graphene surfaces with and without wrinkles. The results could lead to highly sensitive flow sensors or to devices that can harvest electricity from flows.

Researchers have found that water flowing over a material—in particular, carbon nanotubes or graphene—can generate electric currents in the solid. The effect appears in carbon materials because the surfaces are atomically flat and thus allow the liquid to flow largely unobstructed at the liquid–solid boundary, explains Alessandro Siria from the École Normale Supérieure in France. Several models have been proposed to explain the flow-induced currents, often involving charges within the liquid acting on the electrons in the solid. However, experimental uncertainties have prevented researchers from determining which model is best.

Molecules from mucus can be used to produce synthetic bone graft material and help with the healing of larger bone loss, a new study found.

Researchers at KTH Royal Institute of Technology report the development of a bioactive gel which they say could replace the clinical gold standard of autografting, in which lost bone is replaced with healthy bone taken from another part of the patient’s body.

Hongji Yan, a researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says the gel contains mucins, molecules which were derived from cow mucus. The mucins are processed into gels which are combined with monetite granules, a commonly-used synthetic bone graft material. The synthetic gel can be injected to the site of the bone loss.

Generative AI is a catch-all term describing programs that use artificial intelligence to create new material from complex queries, such as “write a poem about monkeys in the style of Robert Frost” or “make an image of pandas draped over living room furniture.”

While AI more generally refers to software programs that can make themselves better by “learning” from new data, and which have been used behind the scenes in all kinds of software for years, generative AI is a fresh consumer-facing spin on the concept.

About 1,000 people from all over the world, including AI researchers and content marketers, attended Tuesday’s Gen AI Conference, which was organized by startup Jasper. It was a lavish affair, held at Pier 27 on the Embarcadero, overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Some researchers are driven by the quest to improve a specific product, like a battery or a semiconductor. Others are motivated by tackling questions faced by a given industry. Rob Macfarlane, MIT’s Paul M. Cook Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, is driven by a more fundamental desire.

“I like to make things,” Macfarlane says. “I want to make materials that can be functional and useful, and I want to do so by figuring out the basic principles that go into making new structures at many different size ranges.” (Image: Adam Glanzman)

Advances in display technologies prompt the development of electronic products with foldable and flexible panels. Flexible displays have thin-film transistors (TFTs) built in that act as an on/off light switch for the display. At the same time, important considerations for the advancement of next generation displays include electrical charge transmission velocity, operation stability, and production cost reduction.

Recently, a research team at POSTECH has proposed a highly efficient crosslinking strategy for a dense and defect-free thin-film organic-inorganic hybrid dielectric layer. The findings from the study were published in Nature Communications.

The global evolution of IoT has raised interest in metal-oxide semiconductor-based circuits with low standby power consumption. Attention has been particularly keen on TFT materials capable of low-cost solution processing. Among several solution-processable semiconductors, metal oxides are regarded as the most successful material platforms for TFTs mainly because of their high charge carrier mobility and operational stability.

Google developed the language model known as Google Bard AI (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) to produce high-quality text by anticipating the next word in a given phrase based on context. It is trained on a sizable corpus of text and may be tailored using smaller datasets to produce material in a particular style or domain.

The third version of OpenAI’s language model, GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), was trained on enormous volumes of text data and is capable of producing text, summarising text, translating text, responding to inquiries, and carrying out a range of other natural language tasks.

Let’s take a look at the top 5 differences between ChatGPT and Google Bard AI.

For centuries, the town of Carrara’s prosperity has depended on artists. Its famed Tuscan marble quarries supplied artists like Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini with the finest material for their sculptures. Today, robots are being used to create modern-day works. Chris Livesay has more.

#news #marble #technology.

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Two types of nanotechnology, metalenses and metamaterials, could soon make Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak a reality.