Lifeboat Foundation

A breakthrough study by the University of Washington.

Founded in 1,861, the University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, with additional campuses in Tacoma and Bothell. Classified as an R1 Doctoral Research University classification under the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, UW is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Here, the authors report the realization of WSe2 Schottky junction field-effect transistors with asymmetric multi-layer graphene and WTe2 van der Waals contacts, enabling reconfigurable polarity, low off-state currents, near-ideal rectifying behaviour and bipolar photovoltaic response.

KAUST

This is according to a press release by the institution published on Sunday.

The prime contractor for the memorial was Morrison Monuments which has experience creating large-scale civic memorials of various shapes and sizes. Based out of Bellbrook, Ohio, Morrison Monuments was responsible for producing the four individual aircraft obelisks with wording and graphics, the center dedication obelisk, the concrete pad on which the memorial stands, the aircraft models and poles, and installing the memorial at the NMUSAF. A subcontractor, Spradlin Brothers of Springfield, Ohio, made the aircraft models.

In total, the project cost The Pioneers of Stealth $254,350, which the group was able to raise via internal fundraising. $234,850 of that total went towards the Morrison Monuments contract, while the remaining $19,500 has been paid to the Air Force Museum Foundation for “perpetual care” of the monument.

Plans for the memorial have been several years in the making. Back in early 2021, The Pioneers of Stealth initiated the ‘concept exploration’ phase for the memorial — during which members’ design concepts and inscription ideas were submitted for review by a special memorial committee. While the location for the memorial was already agreed upon, the design, graphics, and aircraft models to feature still needed to be narrowed down. The deadline for the first round of members’ entries was July 4, 2021.

A proton-driven approach that enables multiple ferroelectric phase transitions sets the stage for ultralow power, high-capacity computer chips.

A proton-mediated approach that produces multiple phase transitions in ferroelectric materials could help develop high-performance memory devices, such as brain-inspired, or neuromorphic, computing chips, a KAUST-led international team has found. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Ferroelectrics, such as indium selenide, are intrinsically polarized materials that switch polarity when placed in an electric field, which makes them attractive for creating memory technologies. In addition to requiring low operating voltages, the resulting memory devices display excellent maximum read/write endurance and write speeds, but their storage capacity is low. This is because existing methods can only trigger a few ferroelectric phases, and capturing these phases is experimentally challenging, says Xin He, who co-led the study under the guidance of Fei Xue and Xixiang Zhang.

Footage of thousands of tiny metal spheres set jiggling in a shallow tray has revealed an arrangement of particles once considered impossible.

A team of physicists from the University of Paris-Saclay in France has observed an unusual combination of order and chaos known as a ‘quasicrystal’ emerging spontaneously in a granular material on a millimeter-scale for the first time.

If there is beauty in order, crystals are the very manifestation of elegance and attraction.

The same AI technology used to mimic human art can now synthesize artificial scientific data, advancing efforts toward fully automated data analysis.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed an AI that generates artificial data from microscopy experiments commonly used to characterize atomic-level material structures. Drawing from the technology underlying art generators, the AI allows the researchers to incorporate background noise and experimental imperfections into the generated data, allowing material features to be detected much faster and more efficiently than before.

The study, “Leveraging generative adversarial networks to create realistic scanning transmission electron microscopy images,” was published in the journal npj Computational Materials.

This process could provide a cheap, sustainable replacement for foam, timber, and plastic.

The future of the construction industry is green„ with scientists developing a way to grow building materials using knitted molds and the root network of fungi. Previous trials with similar composites have been made but the shape and growth constraints of the organic material made it difficult to develop diverse applications.

Now, a team of designers, engineers, and scientists in the Living Textiles Research Group, part of the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment at Newcastle University, which is funded by Research England, have used the knitted molds as a flexible framework or ‘formwork’, creating a composite called ‘mycocrete’ which is stronger and more versatile in terms of shape and form.

Most biological cells have a fixed place in an organism. However, there are instances where these cells acquire mobility, enabling them to traverse the body. Such occurrences are seen during processes like wound recovery, or when cancerous cells divide indiscriminately and spread throughout the body. The characteristics of mobile and stationary cells exhibit several differences, one notable one being the structure of their cytoskeleton.

This structure of protein filaments makes the cells stable, stretchable, and resistant to external forces. In this context, “intermediate filaments” play an important role. Interestingly, two different types of intermediate filaments are found in mobile and stationary cells. Researchers at the University of Göttingen and ETH Zurich have succeeded in precisely measuring and describing the mechanical properties of the two filaments. In the process, they discovered parallels with non-biological materials. The results have been published in the journal Matter.

The scientists used optical tweezers to investigate how the filaments behave under tension. They attached the ends of the filaments to tiny plastic beads, which they then moved in a controlled way with the help of a laser beam. This stretched the two different types of filaments, which are known as vimentin and keratin. The researchers worked out which forces were necessary for the stretching and how the different filaments behaved when they were stretched several times.