Category Physics

The view inside the Ultra High Vacuum Scanning Thermal Microscope, which was used to measure temperature fluxes at the nanoscale. Credit: Joseph Xu

When heat travels between 2 objects that aren’t touching, it flows differently at the smallest scales – distances on the order of the diameter of DNA, or 1/50,000 of a human hair. While researchers have been aware of this for decades, they haven’t understood the process. Heat flow often needs to be prevented or harnessed and the lack of an accurate way to predict it represents a bottleneck in nanotechnology development.

Now, in a unique ultra-low vibration lab at the University of Michigan, engineers have measured how heat radiates from one surface to another in a vacuum at distances down to 2nm...

After shaking, the oil and water in the vial separate, trapping unwanted nanomaterials in the bottom of the oil layer. Credit: Michigan Tech, Sarah Bird

Nano implies small – and that’s great for use in medical devices, beauty products and smartphones – but it’s also a problem. All these tiny particles get into our water and are difficult to remove. Now, researchers have a novel and very simple way to take the nanomaterials out. The tiny nanoparticles, nanowires, nanotubes and other nanomaterials that make up our technology eventually find their way into water. The Environmental Protection Agency says more 1,300 commercial products use some kind of nanomaterial. And we just don’t know the full impact on health and the environment.

Instead, shaking up oil and water traps the nanomaterials, ...

Single-event noise discrimination. Credit: (c) Science 11 December 2015: Vol. 350 no. 6266 pp. 1343-1346, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8446 Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-12-optical-technique-radio-background-noise.html#jCp

A small team of researchers with the University of California has found a way to pick out a single short radio signal burst among a barrage of background noise. Currently it is impossible to separate out a unique signal if there is just one burst present—there needs to be multiple examples. That could change in the near future as the researchers on this new effort have developed a way to convert radio signals to optical signals that can be processed to filter, separate and identify individual components.

The team started with converting the radio signals to optica...

Conceptual design of the robot compared to a desert locust. Credit: Zaitsev, et al. ©2015 IOP Publishing Ltd

Researchers have built a locust-inspired robot that is just 5 inches long, 23 grams, but can jump 11 feet high and cover a horizontal distance of 4.5 ft. This jump height is more than twice the height of similar-sized jumping robots, and is 25X higher than its own length. The robot could have applications in search-and-rescue missions, reconnaissance, and environmental monitoring in rough terrain.

The team of researchers, Valentin Zaitsev, et al is from Tel Aviv University and Ort Braude College, Israel, which inspired the name of the robot: TAUB (Tel Aviv University and Braude College). “We demonstrate a design that is closer to nature,” Zaitsev...