New Antennas and Microchips help Electronics blur the line between Science and Sci-fi

Kaushik Sengupta in his lab at Princeton
Researchers in Kaushik Sengupta’s lab work to expand the capabilities of modern electronics. Photos by Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Sophisticated antenna arrays paired with high-frequency wireless chips act like superpowers for modern electronics, boosting everything from sensing to security to data processing. In his lab at Princeton, Kaushik Sengupta is working to expand those powers even further.

In recent years, Sengupta’s lab has designed antenna arrays that help engineers make strides toward peering through matter, boosting communications in canyons of skyscrapers, putting a medical lab on a smart phone, and encrypting critical data with electromagnetic waves instead of software.

In a new article in Advanced Science, Sengupta’s research team presented a new type of antenna arra...

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How was the Solar System Formed? The Ryugu Asteroid is helping us learn

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)

Our solar system is estimated to be about 4.57 billion years old. Previous analyses of ancient meteorites have shown that minerals were created through chemical reactions with water as far back as 4.5 billion years ago. New findings from the Ryugu asteroid samples indicate that carbonates were forming from water-rock reactions several million years earlier, even closer to the solar system’s beginnings.

Mineral samples collected from the Ryugu asteroid by the Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft are helping UCLA space scientists and colleagues better understand the chemical composition of our solar system as it existed in its infancy, more than 4.5 billion years ago.

In research recently published in Nature Astronomy, scientists using isotopic ana...

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Specific Immune Response to Epstein-Barr Virus discovered

Copyright (c) 2016 Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

Medical science has not yet been able to explain why the Epstein-Barr virus triggers infectious mononucleosis (IM) in some people with initial infections and not in others. But now, a research team led by Elisabeth Puchhammer-Stöckl, head of the Center for Virology at MedUni Vienna, has identified a specific immune response to the virus as the cause, and as a potential target for the development of vaccines. The findings were recently published in the American Society of Hematology’s journal Blood.

Proliferation of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) in humans is normally combated by T cells as part of an antiviral immune response. By means of this important mechanism, certain EBV components (peptides) are presented to the T cells by a specific1LA-E molecules on EBV-infected cells.

A ...

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Approaching the Terahertz Regime

(Left) A chaotic greyscale rectangle. (Right) Isometric view of colored layers sandwiched together.
Antiferromagnetic tunneling junction. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy image of the antiferromagnetic junction showing layers of different materials (left). Diagram showing the materials’ magnetic properties (right). ©2023 Nakatsuji et al. CC-BY

Room temperature quantum magnets switch states trillions of times per second. A class of nonvolatile memory devices, called MRAM, based on quantum magnetic materials, can offer a thousandfold performance beyond current state-of-the-art memory devices. The materials known as antiferromagnets were previously demonstrated to store stable memory states, but were difficult to read from. This new study paves an efficient way for reading the memory states, with the potential to do so incredibly quickly too.

You can probably blink...

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