By attaching a diamond crystal to an AFM tip, researcher at New York City University managed to measure the heat flows at atomic levels in resistors. The method works due to a vacancy in the carbon lattice, two spots are empty of which one is filled with a nitrogen atom. The energy state of the vacancy is temperature dependent and can actually be read out spectroscopically.

Researchers have managed to create a materials that can extract CO2 from a humid environment, which was up to now not possible due to water blocking the absorption. With this hurdle taken, it may be possible to extract CO2 in large quantities from the atmopshere. This would then either be stored or possible even processed with H2 to form carbohydrates. Marsian atmosphere?

Researchers from North Carolina State University have discovered a new phase of solid carbon, called Q-carbon, which is distinct from the known phases of graphite and diamond. They have also developed a technique for using Q-carbon to make diamond-related structures at room temperature and at ambient atmospheric pressure in air. It turns out this configuration is harder than diamond, plus the material has a very low work function. The latter might be very interesting for electronics or as electrode material.

Quoted from one of the authors in a separate interview: "We know that the spin states of atomic nuclei associated with semiconductor defects have excellent quantum properties at room temperature," said Awschalom, Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. "They are coherent, long-lived and controllable with photonics and electronics. Given these quantum 'pieces,' creating entangled quantum states seemed like an attainable goal." Bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic scale could see some interesting applications in sensors, or generally entanglement-enhanced applications.

Collisionless electrostatic shocks (CES) are the dominant process in heating a plasma when using high power lasers. It turns out that ion-ion collisions actually only play a small role. The ability to create small regions of very high ion energy density on time scales shorter than that of hydrodynamic expansion will be of interest in attempts to understand the processes involved in inertial confinement fusion.

Here we explore the electrochemical performance of pyrolyzed skins from the species A. bisporus, also known as the Portobello mushroom, as free-standing, binder-free, and current collector-free Li-ion battery anodes. At temperatures above 900 °C, the biomass-derived carbon nanoribbon-like architectures undergo unique processes to become hierarchically porous. Basically they burned a Portobello mushroom and used it as a battery... now thats an multidisciplinary advanced concept

In a world first, an artificial intelligence machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move. It's been almost 20 years since IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, for the first time under standard tournament rules.

An international team of researchers, including the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Twente in The Netherlands and the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, announced today in Science the observation of a dynamic Mott transition in a superconductor.

Photo credit: The glass has a number of interesting innovations. Ballentine's. A liquor company has created a " Space Glass" that they say can work in the microgravity environment of space. The Open Space Agency's James Parr was commissioned to create the product, and the results are actually quite interesting.

Physicists have found a radical new way to confine electromagnetic energy without it leaking away, akin to throwing a pebble into a pond with no splash. The theory could have broad ranging applications from explaining dark matter to combating energy losses in future technologies.

When submerged, water tends to cling to the top of the spikes, while air and water vapor accrue in the pores between them. The combination of trapped air and water vapor within these cavities forms a gaseous layer that deters moisture from seeping into the surface below. More materials with amazing properties. Might even be usefull for liquid fuel tanks?

It may be feasible to use this in the Marsian atmosphere (9mbar CO2) to directly grow Carbon Nanofibres for infrastructural needs

En-route to metallic hydrogen, which would be superconductive at room temperature. Catch? Need a pressure that it beyond 10 million bar... good luck :)

Small robots that jump on water have been created by scientists and could one day be used in surveillance and search and rescue missions. The team led by Seoul National University's Je-Sung Koh studied water striders to replicate the insect's ability to propel itself from the surface of water.

Both graphene and 3d printing has been around for quite a while, but combined they could provide unique properties of materials, eg in the use of high performance 3d batteries. This paper gives a nice overview of what has been done in the field up to now.

In order to overcome the communication blackout problem suffered by hypersonic vehicles, a matching approach has been proposed for the first time in this paper. It utilizes a double-positive (DPS) material layer surrounding a hypersonic vehicle antenna to match with the plasma sheath enclosing the vehicle. Or in more easy language, basically one provides an antenna as capacitor, in combination with the plasma sheath (an inductor), they form an electrical circuit which becomes transparent for long wavelength radiation (the communication signal). The reasons is that fluctuations are balanced by the twin system, preventing absorption/reflection of the incoming radiation. Elegant solution, but will only work on long wavelength communication, plus I am not sure whether the antenna needs active control (as the plasma sheath conditions change during the re-entry phase).

by Maria Popova "Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought." For as long as I can remember - and certainly long before I had the term for it - I've believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks - knowledge, memories, bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas - that we then combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something "new."

Nice web story on setting up the event horizon telescope network of up to 20 telescopes across the globe to observe the black hole at the galaxy's center

Marc Stephens "ProtoSpace embodies agility," says Vincent Loubière. "We can move from concept to demonstrator quickly." The 'agility' method is modelled on proven successes in the computer industry but the ProtoSpace team also works with automotive and communications blue-chips, as well as start-ups whose creations could have applications in aerospace. Airbus's ACT :)

A 60-year-old theory about the structure of the magnetic fields that surround Earth has been confirmed directly for the first time. The lead author of the paper is an undergraduate student who invented a way to view the Earth's magnetosphere in three dimensions.