Category Physics

The fungi Aspergillus niger (top left), Penicillium simplicissimum (top right) and Penicillium chrysogenum (bottom) can recycle cobalt and lithium from rechargeable batteries. Credit: Aldo Lobos

Although rechargeable batteries in smartphones, cars and tablets can be charged again and again, they don’t last forever. Old batteries often wind up in landfills or incinerators, potentially harming the environment. And valuable materials remain locked inside. Now, a team is turning to naturally occurring fungi to drive an environmentally friendly recycling process to extract cobalt and lithium from tons of waste batteries.

Although a global problem, the U.S. leads the way as the largest generator of electronic waste. It is unclear how many electronic products are recycled...

The charged tip of a scanning tunneling microscope and an additional magnetic field lead to localized stable electron states in graphene. Credit: Nils Freitag, RWTH Aachen

Scientists have created tiny quantum dots in graphene. In a tiny quantum prison, electrons behave quite differently as compared to their counterparts in free space. They can only occupy discrete energy levels, much like the electrons in an atom – for this reason, such electron prisons are often called “artificial atoms.” Artificial atoms may also feature properties beyond those of conventional ones, with the potential for many applications eg quantum computing. Such additional properties have now been shown for artificial atoms in graphene.

“Artificial atoms open up new, exciting possibilities, because we can directly tu...

Credit: Krzysztof Szczypiorski

What if you could hide messages in the tempo of that pounding music? It’s being done. A Polish scientist knows how to hide secret messages in music and is exploring results. ZME Science talked about his dealings with trance and techno, “electronic music meant to shake your mind and body with stomping rhythms and varying tempos.” The report in ZME Science said cybersecurity researcher Krzysztof Szczypiorski has produced tunes with hidden coded messages nested inside tempo variations.

The concept is musical steganography, and it involves coding messages in music...

(a) Nephila edulis spider in its web. (b) Schematic drawing of reflection mode silk biosuperlens imaging. The spider silk was placed directly on top of the sample surface by using a soft tape, which magnify underlying nano objects 2-3 times (c) SEM image of Blu-ray disk with 200/100 nm groove and lines (d) Clear magnified image (2.1x) of Blu-ray disk under spider silk superlens. Credit: Bangor University/ University of Oxford

Scientists achieve a world 1st: increasing microscope’s potential using spider-silk as a superlens. Extending the limit of classical microscope’s resolution has been the ‘El Dorado’ or ‘Holy Grail’ of microscopy for over a century...