Category Physics

One of the unsung workhorses of modern technology is the humble interconnect. This is essentially a wire or set of wires that link one part of an electronic system to another. In ordinary silicon chips, interconnect can take up most of the area of a chip; and the speed and efficiency with which information can travel along these interconnects, is a major limiting factor in computing performance.

A separate entanglement stage is used to preserve the original entanglement needed as part of normal operations—demonstrating a way to connect 2 photonic chips...

Density functional-based tight-binding modelling. Credit: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150820/ncomms9029/full/ncomms9029.html

>>inherent defects give rise to a surprising mechanical property caused by an unusual mechanochemical reaction.What they discovered could potentially unlock the secret to successfully scaling up graphene oxide. “Our team discovered that graphene oxide exhibits remarkable plastic deformation before breaking,” said Espinosa. “Graphene is very strong, but it can break suddenly. We found that graphene oxide, however, will deform first before eventually breaking.”

Huang compares the difference in the materials’ properties to common objects. “Ceramic is strong,” he says, “but if you break it, it will shatter...

This is one of the highest-energy neutrino events from a survey of the northern sky superimposed on a view of the IceCube Lab at the South Pole. Credit: IceCube Collaboration

Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have sorted through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year to gather powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos.

It heralds a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, the nearly massless high-energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies...

Kyoto University’s Institute team coated gold nanorods with lipoprotein. This allowed the nanorods to bind efficiently to nerve cell membranes bearing a pain receptor called TRPV1 (transient receptor potential vanilloid type 1). Near-infrared light was then applied to the nanorod-coated pain receptors. The nanorods heated up, activating the pain receptors to allow an influx of calcium ions through the membrane. Prolonged activation of TRPV1 is known to subsequently lead to their desensitization, bringing pain relief. Importantly, heating the gold nanorods enabled safe activation of the TRPV1 pain receptors alone, without affecting the membrane in which they lie.

Previous studies had shown that magnetic nanoparticles are also able to activate TRPV1 receptors by applying a magnetic fie...