Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: materials

There’s a new form of matter out there and it’s called a supersolid. Born in the labs of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this new matter is seemingly a contradiction. The supersolid combines properties of solids and superfluids — or fluids with zero viscosity, thereby flowing without losing kinetic energy. Supersolids have previously been predicted by physicists, but have not been observed in a lab until now.

“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT and 2001 Noble laureate. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.” Their research was published in the journal Nature.

To develop this seemingly contradictory form of matter, Ketterle’s team manipulated the motion of atoms in a superfluid state of dilute gas, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. Ketterle co-discovered BEC, which won him his Noble prize in physics. “The challenge was now to add something to the BEC to make sure it developed a shape or form beyond the shape of the ‘atom trap,’ which is the defining characteristic of a solid,” Ketterle explained.

Read more

Plastic is a resilient and versatile material, but it’s not that great for the environment — not plastic that’s made from petroleum, anyway. But scientists are cooking up a better alternative.

Chitin, like plastic, is resilient and versatile. Chitin is found in everything from lobster and shrimp shells, insect exoskeletons, and squid beaks. Thanks to a team of Canadian researchers it may soon be found in plastic, too.

Scientists at McGill University in Montreal have developed a process that allows them to process chitinous things into eco-friendly plastic. Associate Professor of Applied Chemistry Audrey Moores told the CBC “it remains biodegradeable, so if it goes in the environment it’s not going to pollute.”

Read more

This dark, tangled web spotted by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is a supernova remnant, created after a massive star ended its life in an explosion and threw its constituent material out into surrounding space. Discover more: https://go.nasa.gov/2G0nVgS&h=AT0m92-1V7h2Z6pdebGy-JSLFWkiXPmUUPBRKQBfBjRr5MNb4P2icu4ffTQ_dprFypeKzuCz-C3C0hVl3k-yh3Z3UBTRypyTjIy3t8gbbczzKB4pzwIStq-VgQvhuYGwyDtjkc6ofafnfp3fZPxsm7h50iXNjV2_ZjqbGOd0hzTeCsgI5QIBpg

Read more

Scerri now knows when people dropped their tools on the barren ridge, but she can only speculate as to just who they were.

“The hominins responsible for the Acheulean at the site made their way into the heart of now arid Arabia by following lake and river channels. Once there, they climbed up the largest dyke, which was also a source of raw material,” she says. The toolmaking site they created there, perched at a lofty vantage point from which they could observe the surrounding plains, hints at how they may have thought and lived. “We don’t know which hominin taxon made these tools, but what we can say is that the hominins were resourceful and intelligent,” adds Scerri, of the Max Planck Institute and the University of Oxford.

Why these hominins took such a route at all is another area of intriguing speculation. “Although Arabia was wetter when these hominins were at Saffaqah, it was still a marginal environment,” Scerri says. “Were they pushed to the margins by larger brained hominins elsewhere, such as Neanderthals or even Homo sapiens in Africa?”

Read more

Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered how our bones grow at an atomic level, showing how an unstructured mass orders itself into a perfectly arranged bone structure. The discovery offers new insights, which could yield improved new implants, as well as increasing our knowledge of bone diseases such as osteoporosis.

The bones in our body grow through several stages, with atoms and molecules joining together, and those bigger groupings joining together in turn. One in the growth process is when molecules crystallise, which means that they transform from an amorphous mass into an ordered structure. Many stages of this transformation were previously a mystery, but now, through a project looking at an imitation of how our bones are built, the researchers have been able to follow this crystallisation process at an atomic level. Their are now published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

“A wonderful thing with this project is that it demonstrates how applied and fundamental research go hand in hand. Our project was originally focused on the creation of an artificial biomaterial, but the material turned out to be a great tool to study bone building processes. We first imitated nature, by creating an artificial copy. Then, we used that copy to go back and study nature,” says Martin Andersson, Professor in Materials Chemistry at Chalmers, and leader of the study.

Read more

They all contain silica, a mineral that’s widespread on Earth and in space.

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, researchers found that the material is produced by the massive explosions of stars. Details: https://go.nasa.gov/2r6Zq7P

Read more

Today’s optical systems—from smartphone cameras to cutting-edge microscopes—use technology that hasn’t changed much since the mid-1700s. Compound lenses, invented around 1730, correct the chromatic aberrations that cause lenses to focus different wavelengths of light in different spots. While effective, these multi-material lenses are bulky, expensive, and require precision polishing or molding and very careful optical alignment. Now, a group of researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) is asking: Isn’t it time for an upgrade?

Read more