Signals from Distant Stars Connect Optical Atomic Clocks across Earth for the first time

Fig.
Antennas and optical lattice clocks used in the measurements

Upper left: Transportable 2.4 m antenna installed at the INAF radio observatory in Medicina, Italy.
Upper middle: Transportable 2.4 m antenna installed at NICT in Koganei, Japan.
Upper right: 34 m antenna located at NICT in Kashima, Japan.
Bottom left: The ytterbium optical lattice clock IT-Yb1, operated at INRIM in Torino, Italy.
Bottom right: The strontium optical lattice clock NICT-Sr1, located at NICT in Koganei, Japan.

Transportable radio telescopes could provide global high-precision comparisons of the best atomic clocks. Using radio telescopes observing distant stars, scientists have connected optical atomic clocks on different continents...

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A Hydrogel that could help Repair Damaged Nerves

100720-artificial-nerve
A conductive polymer hydrogel could help repair damaged peripheral nerves.
Credit: Adapted from ACS Nano 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.0c05197

Injuries to peripheral nerves – tissues that transmit bioelectrical signals from the brain to the rest of the body – often result in chronic pain, neurologic disorders, paralysis or disability. Now, researchers have developed a stretchable conductive hydrogel that could someday be used to repair these types of nerves when there’s damage. They report their results in ACS Nano.

Injuries in which a peripheral nerve has been completely severed, such as a deep cut from an accident, are difficult to treat...

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Diamonds are a Quantum scientist’s best friend

Professor Somnath Bhattacharyya next to the vapour deposition chamber that is used to produce diamonds in the lab.

The discovery of triplet spin superconductivity in diamonds has the potential to revolutionise the high-tech industry. New research led by Professor Somnath Bhattacharyya in the Nano-Scale Transport Physics Laboratory (NSTPL) in the School of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, details the phenomenon. Triplet superconductivity occurs when electrons move in a composite spin state rather than as a single pair. This is an extremely rare, yet efficient form of superconductivity that until now has only been known to occur in one or two other materials, and only theoretically in diamonds.

“In a conventional superconducting material such as aluminium, superconductivity is destroyed by magnetic fields and magnetic impurities, however triplet superc...

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Moon’s Magnetic Crust research sees scientists Debunk Long-held Theory

The Moon ©NASA

New international research into the Moon provides scientists with insights as to how and why its crust is magnetised, essentially ‘debunking’ one of the previous longstanding theories.
Australian researcher and study co-author Dr Katarina Miljkovic, from the Curtin Space Science and Technology Centre, located within the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin University, explained how the new research, published by Science Advances, expands on decades of work by other scientists.
“There are two long term hypotheses associated with why the Moon’s crust might be magnetic: One is that the magnetisation is the result of an ancient dynamo in the lunar core, and the other is that it’s the result of an amplification of the interplanetary magnetic field, created by meteo...

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