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    Small, Precise and Affordable Gyroscope for Navigating without GPS

    April 1, 2020, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    The new resonator and electrodes, on a quarter for scale. The resonator is almost perfectly symmetrical, made of nearly-pure glass. This enables it to vibrate for long periods, similar to the ringing of a wine glass. Credit: Najafi Group, University of Michigan

    A small, inexpensive and highly accurate gyroscope, developed at the University of Michigan, could help drones and autonomous cars stay on track without a GPS signal.

    “Our gyroscope is 10,000 times more accurate but only 10 times more expensive than gyroscopes used in your typical cell phones. This gyroscope is 1,000 times less expensive than much larger gyroscopes with similar performance,” said Khalil Najafi, the Schlumberger Professor of Engineering at U-M and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

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    Hubble finds best Evidence for Elusive Mid-sized Black Hole

    April 1, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This illustration depicts a cosmic homicide in action. A wayward star is being shredded by the intense gravitational pull of a black hole that contains tens of thousands of solar masses. The stellar remains are forming an accretion disk around the black hole. Flares of X-ray light from the super-heated gas disk alerted astronomers to the black hole’s location; otherwise it lurked unknown in the dark. The elusive object is classified as an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH), as it is much less massive than the monster black holes that dwell in the centers of galaxies. Therefore, IMBHs are mostly quiescent because they do not pull in as much material, and are hard to find. Hubble observations provide evidence that the IMBH dwells inside a dense star cluster...
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    Blood Test Detects over 50 Types of Cancer, some before symptoms appear

    March 31, 2020, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Identification of cancer status for more than 50 cancer types, as well as tissue of origin localization, from a single blood draw. Cell-free DNA is isolated from blood samples drawn from a patient without cancer (top) or with cancer (bottom), and subjected to a targeted methylation sequencing assay. Sequencing results identifying methylated (red) or unmethylated (blue) CpG regions are fed into a machine-learning classifier that can identify the presence or absence of cancer, as well as identify the tissue of origin (TOO).

    In a study involving thousands of participants, a new blood test detected more than 50 types of cancer as well as their location within the body with a high degree of accuracy, according to an international team of researchers led by Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and...

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    A Key Development in the drive for Energy-Efficient Electronics

    March 31, 2020, Categories  Physics, Technology/Electronics

    Driving forward energy-efficient electronics
    Sample of the advanced material undergoing analysis by muon spectroscopy. A muon is a sub-atomic particle. 

    Scientists have made a breakthrough in the development of a new generation of electronics that will require less power and generate less heat.

    It involves exploiting the complex quantum properties of electrons – in this case, the spin state of electrons.

    In a world first, the researchers – led by a team of physicists from the University of Leeds – have announced in the journal Science Advances that they have created a ‘spin capacitor’ that is able to generate and hold the spin state of electrons for a number of hours.

    Previous attempts have only ever held the spin state for a fraction of a second. In electronics, a capacitor holds energy in the form of electric charge...

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