Story 1: Scientists recently mapped Yellowstone’s underground “plumbing”
Source: Smithsonian Magazine Story by Sarah Kuta
- Scientists have long wanted to understand what’s going on deep beneath the amazing natural wonders of Yellowstone National Park, such as the stunning geyser Old Faithful.
- So recently, using a helicopter equipped with a an 80-foot-diameter, hexagon-shaped electromagnetic ring dangling underneath, US Geological Survey researchers mapped the earth below Yellowstone as far as 8,200 feet deep—about a mile and a half!
- The hexagon-shaped electromagnetic ring sent out electromagnetic pulses that traveled below the surface and bounced back up again, similar to a radar signal.
- After analyzing the data gathered, the US Geological Survey researchers gained an accurate and detailed deep underground picture of the rocks, clay, and thermal liquid below Yellowstone.
- Scientists are just beginning to explore the underground survey results, and already they’ve discovered one new mystery: Old Faithful and the Upper Geyser basin are six miles apart, but they appear to share the same hydrothermal source below the surface.
- In addition to breakthrough geological knowledge, this new data will also help scientists learn more about the tiny microbes that can survive in Yellowstone’s scalding hot springs.
Story 2: Team of scientists claims they can bring dead human eye cells back to life
Source: Futurism.com Story by Lonnie Lee Hood
Link: https://futurism.com/neoscope/scientists-eye-cells-back-to-life
- A team of researchers from Switzerland and the US recently announced they “woke up” light-sensing cells from eyes harvested from human organ donors five hours after death, a breakthrough that could potentially allow scientists to extend the shelf life of donor organs and lead to new ways to treat eye diseases.
- In specific, the team claims they got retinal neuron cells to communicate with each other post-mortem and were able to wake up photoreceptor cells in the human macula, which is the part of the retina responsible for our central vision and our ability to see fine detail and color.
- In eyes obtained up to five hours after an organ donor’s death, these cells responded to bright light, colored lights, and even very dim flashes of light.
- The team believes they may be able to use this research to reverse some types of blindness.
Story 3: Scientists announce a non-silicon transistor, which should allow semiconductors to keep getting smaller
Source: Gizmodo.com Story by Kevin Hurler
Link: https://gizmodo.com/more-efficient-magneto-electric-transistor-could-dethro-1848793095
- First, we need to set the stage for this news:
- A transistor is a binary “on/off” switch and the fundamental building block of today’s chips, which are small pieces of silicon containing integrated circuits made with transistors.
- Today’s electronics in computers, our cars, smart TVs, smartphones, appliances, you name it, have silicon chips with millions or even billions of transistors.
- The drive to make transistors smaller and to pack more on chips to boost performance (with some transistors measuring only a few billionths of a meter wide) presents a serious challenge with energy consumption, heat, and limits on total chip size.
- With the growing demand for faster and smaller electronics engineers are facing a real dilemma.
- A team of researchers from the University of Buffalo and the University of Nebraska Lincoln now want to turn the industry upside-down with a design for a non-silicon, graphene-based transistor, which should allow transistors to keep getting smaller.
- Here’s what makes their approach totally different from today’s silicon transistors:
- Current silicon transistors typically compute by pushing electrons through a gate: when electrons are flowing through the gate, it represents a 1 in binary code, and when they’re not, it’s a 0.
- The research team says their non-silicon graphene-based transistor design relies instead on the spin of electrons instead of their flow.
- Electrons can spin in one of two directions: up or down.
- The research team’s revolutionary two-layer transistor starts with a layer of graphene that electrons can flow through.
- Underneath the layer of graphene, the designers placed a layer of chromium oxide.
- When a positive voltage is applied to the experimental graphene transistor, the electrons in the chromium oxide layer spin upwards, and, as a result, the electrons in the graphene layer veer to the left.
- When a negative voltage is applied, the electrons in the chromium oxide layer spin down and the electrons in the graphene layer veer right.
- This left and right movement of the graphene electrons creates easy-to-detect signals that can correspond to 1’s and 0’s of computer “binary” code.
- And the researchers claim their graphene-based transistors would also make electronics run cooler and may help cut global digital energy consumption
Story 4: Engineers invent the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot
Source: CNN Story by Megan Marples
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/25/world/worlds-smallest-remote-controlled-walking-robots-scn/index.html
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IP7jptXjgQ
- Engineers at Northwestern University recently announced the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot.
- Each one of the tiny robots [which look like a crab or spider with multiple legs] is about half a millimeter wide, which is smaller than the thickness of a United States penny.
- The robots, which are made using a malleable shape-memory alloy, start out as flat objects, similar to a piece of paper.
- Then the legs and arms are bent so the robot can stand. The crab-like robot stays standing on its legs until heat from lasers is used to start the robot walking.
- Is this just a fun stunt? The researchers say the tiny crab robots could be used in performing minimally invasive surgeries or aid in the assembly and repair of ultra-small-scale machines.