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    Spintronics: Ultra-Short Spin Waves in an astoundingly Simple Material

    March 28, 2019, Categories  Technology/Electronics, Physics

    An ultrashort spin wave (red) running through a nickel iron layer. Towards the center of the layer, the magnetic direction (blue arrows) swings only up and down in a sort of knot, while the motion in the other parts remains circular — with opposing sense of magnetic rotation.
    Credit: HZDR / Juniks

    Due to its potential to make computers faster and smartphones more efficient, spintronics is considered a promising concept for the future of electronics. In a collaboration including the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), a team of researchers has now successfully generated so-called spin waves much more easily and efficiently than was previously deemed possible...

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    In Hunt for Life, Astronomers Identify most Promising Stars

    March 28, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space


    Artists’ concept of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite against a background of stars and orbiting planets in the Milky Way.
    Credit: European Space Agency, European Southern Observatory and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    NASA’s new Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is designed to ferret out habitable exoplanets, but with hundreds of thousands of sunlike and smaller stars in its camera views, which of those stars could host planets like our own?

    TESS will observe 400,000 stars across the whole sky to catch a glimpse of a planet transiting across the face of its star, one of the primary methods by which exoplanets are identified.

    A team of astronomers from Cornell University, Lehigh University and Vanderbilt University has identified the most promising targe...

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    CRISPR-chip enables Digital Detection of DNA without Amplification

    March 27, 2019, Categories  Health/Medical, Biology/Biotechnology

    Kiana Aran’s novel system immobilizes the CRISPR complexes on the surface of graphene-based transistors. These complexes search a genome to find their target sequence and, if the search is successful, bind to its DNA. This binding changes the conductivity of the graphene material in the transistor, which detects the change using a handheld reader.
    Credit: Keck Graduate Institute (KGI)

    Researchers have found multiple applications for the CRISPR gene editing technology since it came into use by the scientific community...

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    Icy Giant Planets in the Laboratory

    March 27, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Even under extremely high pressure, such as those in the interior of Neptune or Uranus, there are stable crystal structures of carbon (orange) and hydrogen (gray). This discovery by HZDR researchers reveals new possibilities for the inner structure of the ice giants.
    Credit: HZDR / J. Vorberger

    Researchers use plastics to better understand what happens inside planets. Giant planets like Uranus and Neptune may contain much less free hydrogen than previously assumed. Researchers from the German Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) drove shock waves through two different types of plastic to reach the same temperatures and pressures present inside such planets, and observed the behavior using ultra-strong X-ray laser pulses...

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