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A group of international researchers at The University of Manchester have revealed a novel method that could fine tune the angle—"twist"—between atom-thin layers that form exotic manmade nanodevices called van der Waals heterostructures—and help accelerate the next generation of electronics.

Scientists striving to understand how and when volcanoes might erupt face a challenge: many of the processes take place deep underground in lava tubes churning with dangerous molten Earth. Upon eruption, any subterranean markers that could have offered clues leading up to a blast are often destroyed.

Catch up on the most important updates from this week.

On the long road home.

Fat molecules attributed to ancient sea sponges actually belonged to algae, two new studies suggest.

Scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and Wildlife Computers, Inc. today announced the release of a new activity data product application for marine animal tracking. The technology is designed to remotely track and transmit data gathered on an animal's activity levels over several months along with the temperatures and depths they experienced.

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that's essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

German divers who recently fished an Enigma encryption machine out of the Baltic Sea, used by the Nazis to send coded messages during World War II, handed their rare find over to a museum for restoration on Friday.

Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen have, in collaboration with Norwegian researchers in the ERC Synergy project, ICE2ICE, have shown that abrupt climate change occurred as a result of widespread decrease of sea ice. This scientific breakthrough concludes a long-running debate on the mechanisms causing abrupt climate change during the glacial period. It also documents that the cause of the swiftness and extent of sudden climate change must be found in the oceans.

The DUNE collaboration has published their first scientific paper based on data collected with the ProtoDUNE single-phase detector located at CERN's Neutrino Platform. The results show that the detector is performing with greater than 99% efficiency, making it not only the largest, but also the best-performing liquid-argon time projection chamber to date. Scientists now are using their findings to refine their experimental techniques and prepare for the construction of the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment at the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility, a next-generation neutrino experimental program hosted by the Department of Energy's Fermilab in the United States.

In the last five decades, we've learned a lot about the secret lives of proteins—how they work, what they interact with, the machinery that makes them function—and the pace of discovery is accelerating.

A new machine learning approach offers important insights into catalysis, a fundamental process that makes it possible to reduce the emission of toxic exhaust gases or produce essential materials like fabric.

In a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, researchers at the University of Rochester were able to use magnetism to determine, for the first time, when carbonaceous chondrite asteroids—asteroids that are rich in water and amino acids—first arrived in the inner solar system. The research provides data that helps inform scientists about the early origins of the solar system and why some planets, such as Earth, became habitable and were able to sustain conditions conducive for life, while other planets, such as Mars, did not.

The world's largest solar observatory, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, just released its first image of a sunspot. Although the telescope is still in the final phases of completion, the image is an indication of how the telescope's advanced optics and four-meter primary mirror will give scientists the best view of the Sun from Earth throughout the next solar cycle.

Neutrinos are chargeless particles with about a mass about a millionth that of an electron that are created by the nuclear processes that occur in the Sun and other stars. These particles are often colorfully described as the 'ghosts' of the particle zoo because they interact so weakly with matter. A paper published in EPJ C by the Borexino collaboration—including XueFeng Ding, Postdoc Associate of Physics at Princeton University, United States—documents the attempts of the Borexino experiment to measure low-energy neutrinos from the Sun's carbon-nitrogen-oxygen (CNO) cycle for the first time.

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A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has built and tested a photonic quantum computer that demonstrates quantum supremacy. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes their computer, which they call Jiuzhang, and how well it performed while conducting Gaussian boson sampling.

The stars are constantly moving across the sky. Known as proper motion, this motion is imperceptible to the unaided eye but is being measured with increasing precision by Gaia. This animation shows the proper motions of 40 000 stars, all located within 100 parsecs (326 light years) of the Solar System. The animation begins with the stars in their current positions; the brightness of each dot representing the brightness of the star it represents.

Calculations for certain quantum systems whose parts interact over long distances will be much easier to perform thanks to the work of a RIKEN physicist and his collaborator, who have extended an assumption that holds for materials with short-range interactions.

UNSW researchers have overcome a major design challenge on the path to controlling the dimensions of so-called DNA nanobots—structures that assemble themselves from DNA components.

Light-powered processes from hydrogen production to air purification could see a boost in performance under ambient light thanks to a new material system that can directly convert visible light into ultraviolet light with an efficiency that doubles previous records.

Scientists have recently revealed, both theoretically and experimentally, that germanium atoms can arrange themselves into a 2-D "bi-triangular" lattice on zirconium diboride thin films grown on germanium single crystals to form a "flat band material" with an embedded "kagome" lattice. The result provides experimental support to a theoretical prediction of flat bands emerging from trivial atomic geometry and indicates the possibility of their existence in many more materials.

In the last decade and a half, the Bosnian town of Visoko has become a popular tourist attraction thanks to several “energy pyramids”, tree covered hills that some claim are actually part of the largest pyramid complex ever built. The 350-foot-high Pljesevica Hill, aka the Pyramid of the Moon and the 720-foot-high Visocica Hill, or […]The post Bosnia's Energy Pyramids - Simple Hills or Ancient Man-Made Complex? first appeared on Oddity Central - Collecting Oddities.

Under the current pandemic conditions, activities out in nature are a popular pastime. The beneficial effects of a diverse nature on people's mental health have already been documented by studies on a smaller scale. Scientists of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, the iDiv, and the University of Kiel now examined for the first time whether a diverse nature also increases human well-being on a Europe- wide scale.

Extremely light and weakly interacting particles may play a crucial role in cosmology and in the ongoing search for dark matter. Unfortunately, however, these particles have so far proved very difficult to detect using existing high-energy colliders. Researchers worldwide have thus been trying to develop alternative technologies and methods that could enable the detection of these particles.