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Catalyst insight may unlock safer, on-demand ozone water disinfection

University of Pittsburgh researchers have made an important step toward providing hospitals and water treatment facilities with a safer, greener alternative to chlorine-based disinfection.

The team, which includes scientists from Drexel University and Brookhaven National Laboratory, uncovered key design principles for catalysts that can generate ozone, a disinfecting agent, on demand. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis.

This breakthrough addresses a critical challenge in water sanitation. Chlorine, commonly used to kill bacteria on surfaces and in water—including most municipal drinking water—is hazardous to transport and store, and its byproducts can be carcinogenic. These risks limit its use and motivate the search for safer disinfectants.

LHC data confirm validity of new model of hadron production—and test foundations of quantum mechanics

A boiling sea of quarks and gluons, including virtual ones—this is how we can imagine the main phase of high-energy proton collisions. It would seem that particles here have significantly more opportunities to evolve than when less numerous and much “better-behaved” secondary particles spread out from the collision point. However, data from the LHC accelerator prove that reality works differently, in a manner that is better described by an improved model of proton collisions.

A lot happens during high-energy proton-proton collisions. Protons are hadrons, i.e. clusters of partons—quarks and the gluons that bind them together. When protons collide with each other at sufficiently high energies, their quarks and gluons (including the virtual ones, which appear momentarily during interactions) enter into various complex interactions.

Only when they “cool down” do the quarks stick together to form new hadrons, which scatter from the collision area and are recorded in detectors. Intuition therefore suggests that the entropy of the produced hadrons—a quantity describing the number of states in which the particle system can find itself—should be different from that in the parton phase of the collision, when there are many interacting quarks and gluons, and the interactions appear at first glance to be as chaotic as they are dynamic.

A direct leap into terahertz: Dirac materials enable efficient signal conversion at room temperature

Highspeed Internet, autonomous driving, the Internet of Things: data streams are proliferating at enormous speed. But classic radio technology is reaching its limits: the higher the data rate, the faster the signals need to be transmitted.

Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have now demonstrated that weak radio signals can be efficiently converted into significantly higher frequencies using this material that is just several tens of nanometers thick. And at room temperature, at that. The results open up prospects for future generations of mobile communications and high-resolution sensor technology. The paper is published in the journal Communications Physics.

The more data to be transmitted simultaneously, the higher the carrier frequency must be. As a result, research is now delving into the terahertz range. This frequency spectrum lies outside the microwave range currently used and, so far, has been difficult to access technologically.

Magnetism switching in antiferromagnets: Two distinct mechanisms successfully visualized

A research team led by Ryo Shimano of the University of Tokyo has successfully visualized two distinct mechanisms through which up and down spins, inherent properties of electrons, switch in an antiferromagnet, a material in which spin alignments cancel each other out. One of the visualized mechanisms provides a working principle for developing ultrafast, non-volatile magnetic memory and logic devices, which could be much faster than today’s technologies.

The findings are published in the journal Nature Materials.

Paper slips with holes, small metal rods, vacuum tubes, and transistors: These are technologies that have been used to encode 0s and 1s, the basis of classical computation. However, the world’s ever-growing computational needs demand yet more powerful tools. Antiferromagnets are a class of materials whose magnetic properties, or lack thereof, could be leveraged to encode 0s and 1s in a novel way.

Tiny Earthquakes Spark a Microbial Awakening Beneath Yellowstone

Researchers studying Yellowstone’s depths discovered that small earthquakes can recharge underground microbial life.

The quakes exposed new rock and fluids, creating bursts of chemical energy that microbes can use. Both the water chemistry and the microbial communities shifted dramatically in response. This dynamic may help explain how life survives in deep, dark environments.

A large portion of earth’s life lives underground.

Contractors with hacking records accused of wiping 96 govt databases

U.S. prosecutors have charged two Virginia brothers arrested on Wednesday with allegedly conspiring to steal sensitive information and destroy government databases after being fired from their jobs as federal contractors.

Twin brothers Muneeb and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, were also sentenced to several years in prison in June 2015, after pleading guilty to accessing U.S. State Department systems without authorization and stealing personal information belonging to dozens of co-workers and a federal law enforcement agent who was investigating their crimes.

Muneeb Akhter also hacked a private data aggregation company in November 2013 and the website of a cosmetics company in March 2014.

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