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Although the specific causes of this part of near-death experiences remain unclear, tunnel vision can occur when blood and oxygen flow is depleted to the eye. Image: Neil T/Flickr

Near-death experiences that hav Secure remote networks  e been widely reported by patients now have a scientific explanation. This phenomenon is thought to be caused by the abnormal functioning of dopamine and oxygen flow.

The scientists published their findings in the journal Trends of Cognitive Sciences. Approximately 3% of the US population reports to have had a near-death experience, and they have been widely reported since ancient Greece. One study reported that many of people experiencing near-death experiences weren’t actually in danger of dying, though most thought they smart vending solution  were.

This feeling is also common in patients with Cotard or walking corpse syndrome. They hold the delusional belief that they are deceased, and this occurs generally following trauma, such as the advanced stages of typhoid or multiple sclerosis.

The use of a number of medicinal or recreational drugs can often mirror the euphoria felt in near-death experiences, such as ketamine. All of the features of near-death cellular router wifiexperiences have some basis in normal brain function that has gone awry.

There is a problem with being able to analyze these near-death experiences experimentally instead of anecdotally but there is hope using cognitive neuroscience. Researchers might be able to duplicate these sensations by stimulating brain funciton in the lab, without putting anyone’s life in danger.

[via Scientific American]

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This diagram shows the layered structure analyzed for its  Grid Analytics System magnetic properties. Yellow spheres represent tellurium atoms; light blue spheres represent antimony-bismuth; and black spheres represent sulfur. The black sphere with an arrow represents an atom of dopant, and green spheres with arrows show atoms of europium. Different colored arrows show various ways an europium ion can be affected by the interface between the materials: within the plane via Heisenberg interaction (orange), between the planes (green) through super-exchange interaction, or spin-polarized states at the topological insulator surface (blue).

Researchers reveal an unusual magnetic behavior that could be used to probe a variety of exotic physical phenomena, and could ultimately be used to produce key components of future quantum computers.

An exotic kind of magnetic behavior, driven by the mere proximity of two materials, has been analyzed by a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere using a technique called spin-polarized neutron reflectometry.

The novel phenomenon occurs at the boundary between a ferromagnet and a type of material called a topological insulator, which blocks electricity from flowing through all of its bulk but whose surface is, by contrast, a very good electrical conductor. In the new work, a layer of topological insulator material is bonded to a ferromagnetic layer. Where the two materials meet, an effect takes place called proximity-driven magnetic order, producing a localized and controllable magnetic pattern at the interface.

The research is described in a paper appearing this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, written by MIT doctoral student Mingda Li, postdoc Cui-Zu Chang, professor of nuclear science and engineering Ju Li, senior scientist Jagadeesh Moodera, and seven others.

This “proximity magnetism” effect could create an energy gap, a necessary feature for transistors, in a topological insulator, making it possible to turn a device off and on as a potential building block for spintronics, says Mingda Li, the lead author of the paper. “However, the proximity effect is usually weak,” he says, without this team’s use of a magnetic topological insulator “to enhance it and lock new magnetic order near the interface.”

“This could be a building block of quantum computers,” Moodera says. “It also opens up some fundamental new phenomena” for study by physicists.

“The interaction at the interface makes this exotic phenomenon possible,” Chang adds.

O cloud VMS ne of the new findings of this research is that the magnetism induced by the proximity of the two materials is not just at the surface, but actually extends into the interior of the topological insulator material. “We were able to show that the magnetism exists inside the topological insulator,” Moodera says.

Possible applications of the new findings include the creation of spintronics, transistors based on the spin of particles rather than their charge. These are expected to have low energy dissipation if based on topological insulators, and are a very active area of research.

Because the interface produces a channel with virtually no dissipation, it can act as “a perfect quantum wire,” Ju Li says. “It cannot be better than that for a quantum conductance channel. So having this precise control of the magnetic structure could lead to novel quantum spintronics.”

He adds that the findings, in addition to near-term practical applications, “from a physics point of view, opens up a huge area of productive work.” This includes the study of predicted physical phenomena such as Majorana fermions, particles predicted in 1937 but not yet observed, which, unlike all known subatomic particles, serve as their own antiparticles. These theorized particles “have yet to be explored. It opens another avenue to explore these things,” he says.

“The significance of this work is threefold,” says Qi-Kun Xue, a professor of physics at Tsinghua University in China who was not involved in this work. The three areas, he says, are “to demonstrate proximity magnetism, the enhancement of such magnetism … and the tunability of this interfacial m wi fi  agnetic structure.” He adds that the finding is a significant step toward a device application of magnetic topological insulators. “In particular,” he explains, “the consistent results from independent experimental tools” make the results “robust.”

The work included researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Northeastern University, and Boston College. It was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Energy.

Publication: Mingda Li, et al., “Proximity-Driven Enhanced Magnetic Order at Ferromagnetic-Insulator–Magnetic-Topological-Insulator Interface,” Phys. Rev. Lett., 2105, 115, 087201; doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.115.087201

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After years of progress, scientists are now coming closer and closer to making real-world objects disappear from view. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have made a three-dimensional object disappear from view, from any angle, at microwave wavelengths.

This latest research used plasmonic meta-materials to make an 18-inch cylindrical tub iot  e invisible. It was published by Andrea Alu et al in this week’s New Journal of Physics. Objects are visible because light rays bounce off them, hitting our retinas and allowing our brains to process the information.

Meta-materials redirect light to conceal objects, but the actual cloaking is hard. Plasmonic meta-materials cancel out the light scattering from an object. Once a cylinder is coated with these kinds of materials, they block the light rays, meaning that it becomes invisible.

Previously, meta-mater industrial m2m  ials had been used to create a mirage-like effect using a panel of nanotubes that were electrically stimulated, bending the light rays. It’s a breakthrough, but before the plethora of applications are considered, researchers need to figure out how they can apply this to optical wavelengths, as their tests were performed with high-frequency wavelengths, like the microwave spectrum.

They’re pursuing their research, but making objects invisible isn’t their priority. The main application of these kinds of materials ATM Remote Diagnostic   is to improve biomedical imaging.

[via Wired, images by TechChunks and Geekologie]

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While using high-speed cameras to look at jets of plasma, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) discovered a surprisi Industrial 3g router  ng connection between kink instability and Rayleigh-Taylor instability that ha Remote Automation  s never been seen before.

PASADENA, California — January saw the biggest solar storm since 2005, generating some of the most dazzling northern lights in recent memory.

The source of that storm—and others like it—was the sun’s magnetic field, described by invisible field lines that protrude from and loop back into the burning ball of gas. Sometimes these field lines break—snapping like a rubber band pulled too tight—and join with other nearby lines, releasing energy that can then launch bursts of plasma known as solar flares. Huge chunks of plasma from the sun’s surface can zip toward Earth and damage orbiting satellites or bump them off their paths.

These chunks of plasma, called coronal mass ejections, can also snap Earth’s magnetic field lines, causing charged particles to speed toward Earth’s magnetic poles; this, in turn, sets off the shimmering light shows we know as the northern and southern lights.

Industrial 3G Router  Even though the process of field lines breaking and merging with other lines—called magnetic reconnection—has such significant effects, a detailed picture of what precisely is going on has long eluded scientists, says Paul Bellan, professor of applied physics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

Now, using high-speed cameras to look at jets of plasma in the lab, Bellan and graduate student Auna Moser have discovered a surprising phenomenon that provides clues to just how magnetic reconnection occurs. They describe their results in a paper published in the February 16 issue of the journal Nature.

“Trying to understand nature by using engineering techniques is indeed a hallmark of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech,” says Ares Rosakis, the Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics and professor of mechanical engineering and the chair of engineering and applied science.

In the experiments, Moser fired jets of hydrogen, nitrogen, and argon plasmas at speeds of about 10 to 50 kilometers per second across a distance of more than 20 centimeters in a vacuum. Plasma is a gas so hot that atoms are stripped of their electrons. As a throughway for speeding electrons, the jets act like electrical wires. The experiment requires 200 million watts of power to produce jets that are a scorching 20,000 degrees Kelvin and carry a current of 100,000 amps. To study the jets, Moser used cameras that can take a snapshot in less than a microsecond, or one millionth of a second.

As in all electrical currents, the flowing electrons in the plasma jet generate a magnetic field, which then exerts a force on the plasma. These electromagnetic interactions between the magnetic field and the plasma can cause the jet to writhe and form a rapidly expanding corkscrew. This behavior, called a kink instability, has been studied for nearly 60 years, Bellan says.

But when Moser looked closely at this behavior in her experimental plasma jets, she saw something entirely unexpected.

She found that—more often than not—the corkscrew shape that developed in her jets grew exponentially and extremely fast. The jets in the experiment formed 20-centimeter-long coils in just 20 to 25 microseconds. She also noticed tiny ripples that began appearing on the inner edge of the coil just before the jet broke—the moment when there was a magnetic reconnection.

In the beginning, Moser and Bellan say, they did not know what they were seeing—they just knew it was strange. “I thought it was a measurement error,” Bellan says. “But it was way too reproducible. We were seeing it day in and day out. At first, I thought we would never figure it out.”

But after months of additional experiments, they determined that the kink instability actually spawns a completely different kind of phenomenon, called a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. A Rayleigh-Taylor instability happens when a heavy fluid that sits on top of a light fluid tries to trade places with the light fluid. Ripples form and grow at the interface between the two, allowing the fluids to swap places.

What Moser and Bellan realized is that the kink instability creates conditions that give rise to a Rayleigh-Taylor instability. As the coiled plasma expands—due to the kink instability—it accelerates outward. Just like a passenger being pushed back into the seat of an accelerating car, the accelerated plasma is pushed down on the vacuum behind it. The plasma tries to swap places with the trailing vacuum by forming ripples that then expand—just like when gravity forces a heavy fluid to try to change places with a light fluid underneath. The Rayleigh-Taylor instability—as revealed by the ripples on the trailing side of the accelerating plasma—grows in about a microsecond.

“People have not observed anything like this before,” Bellan says.

Although the Rayleigh-Taylor instability has been studied for more than 100 years, no one had considered the possibility that it could be caused by a kink instability, Bellan says. The two types of instabilities are so different that to see them so closely coupled was a shock. “Nobody ever thought there was a connection,” he says.

What is notable is that the two instabilities occur at very different scales, the researchers say. While the coil created by the kink instability spans about 20 centimeters, the Rayleigh-Taylor instability is much smaller, making ripples just two centimeters long. Still, those smaller ripples rapidly erode the jet, forcing the electrons to flow faster and faster through a narrowing channel. “You’re basically choking it off,” Bellan explains. Soon, the jet breaks, causing a magnetic reconnection.

Magnetic reconnection on the sun often involves phenomena that span scales from a million meters to just a few meters. At the larger scales, the physics is relatively simple and straightforward. But at the smaller scales, the physics becomes more subtle and complex—and it is in this regime that magnetic reconnection takes place. Magnetic reconnection is also a key issue in developing thermonuclear fusion as a future energy source using plasmas in the laboratory. One of the key advances in this study, the researchers say, is being able to relate phenomena at large scales, such as the kink instability, to those at small scales, such as the Rayleigh-Taylor instability.

The researchers note that, although kink and Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities may not drive magnetic reconnection in all cases, this mechanism is a plausible explanation for at least some scenarios in nature and the lab.

The title of Moser and Bellan’s Nature paper is “Magnetic reconnection from a multiscale instability cascade.” This research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Image: A. L. Moser and P. M. Bellan, Caltech

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Deceleration in the centrifuge: Molecules lose speed drastically when they are guided against the centrifugal force to the center of a rotating disk. Electrodes guide the particles to the center of the centrifuge. The rotating electrodes are likewise designed as disks to ensure mechanical stability. The edges of the disks act like electrostatic guiderails for the molecules. Seen here are the inwardly bent electrodes that are used to guide the particles to the rotation axis. The electrode disks aren’t symmetric with respect to the center of the disk, so the holes in them balance them out to prevent any imbalance during rotation. Credit: MPI of Quantum Optics

A new method of using centrifugal force to decelerate particles makes it possible to produce relatively large quantities of cold molecules in a continuous flow, which could create new opportunities for chemistry and quantum information processing.

Compared with our breath, passenger planes move at a pretty leisurely pace. On the average, nitrogen molecules, for example, travel at a speed of more than 1,700 kilometers per hour at room temperature, or almost one-and-a-half times the speed of sound. This means the particles are much too fast for many experiments, a Touchscreen & Vending PC  nd also some conceivable applications. However, physicists at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching have now found a rather simple way to slow down polar molecules to about 70 kilometers per hour. They let the molecules of various substances, such as fluoromethane, run up against the centrifugal force on a rotating disk, while being guided by electrodes. The speed of the decelerated molecules corresponds to a temperature of minus 272 degrees Celsius. The new method makes it possible to produce relatively large quantities of cold molecules  Overhead Line Monitoring  in a continuous flow, which could be useful, for instance, for targeted chemical reactions of individual particles, or the processing of quantum information.

Chemical reactions are pretty uncontrolled. The reaction partners encounter each other by chance and then collide quite violently, whereupon it is not certain they will do what chemists expect them to do. Bringing them close to each other systematically and at a leisurely pace could favor some transformations that otherwise rarely occur. For this to happen, chemists need slow, and therefore cold, molecules, and they need these in large quantities. Physicists as well rely on cold molecules for many experiments, as well as for new technological applications, such as quantum information processing. For many scientists, especially in low-temperature physics, it should thus be welcome news that researchers working with Sotir Chervenkov and Gerhard Rempe at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics have developed a versatile and efficient brake for polar molecules.

The Garching-based team’s decelerator slows down the particles – in their current experiments, molecules of fluoromethane, trifluoromethane and 3,3,3-trifluoropropine – from about 700 to 70 kilometers per hour. Since the speed of the particles can be expressed in temperature units, this corresponds to reducing the temperature from 100 K to 1 K, or from minus 173 to minus 272 degrees Celsius. “Nitrogen-cooled sources supply molecules at 100 Kelvin, and we also know some good methods for further cooling molecules at 1 Kelvin,” says Sotir Chervenkov. “But there are currently no efficient methods for the range in between, and particularly none that produce a continuous flow of cold molecules.”

The principle of the molecular brake: Four electrodes initially guide polar molecules from the entry of the centrifuge at the lower left along the edge of a rotating disk. They are then guided in a spiral to the center of the disk. Two static electrodes at the side of the disk are shown in yellow and green, and the electrodes mounted on the disk, i m2m connectivity  n violet and pink. Credit: Sotir Chervenkov/MPI of Quantum Optics

Four electrodes guide molecules to the center of the centrifuge

The Max Planck researchers rely here on an amply known force, but one that has never before been used to slow down molecules: centrifugal force. The molecular brake thus consists of a centrifuge that rotates at up to 43 revolutions per second: a 40-centimetre-in-diameter rotating disk on which the particles are guided from its periphery to its center. Four electrodes with alternating polarity spaced one millimeter apart and arranged at the apices of a square serve as guiderails imposing with their electric field a travel direction on the molecules.

Two static electrodes gird the disk brake. Through an opening in this double ring, the Max Planck physicists guide the particles into the decelerator. On the disk are likewise mounted, along almost the entire circumference, two electrodes, but not forming closed rings. Rather, the two electrodes bend in a spiral toward the center across about a quarter of the circular area.

To ensure that there are always four electrostatic guiderails keeping the molecules on track along their deceleration path, a further electrode pair accompanies the particles along the spiral coil. These electrodes are tapered and interface with the static electrode ring at a distance of just 0.2 millimeters, so that it looks as if they branched out of the ring. The molecules are thus moved smoothly onto the curved path, on which they fight against the centrifugal force and drastically lose speed until a further curve in the electrodes in the center of the disk guides them up and away from the decelerator.

Molecules would have to fly up 2,000 meters against the Earth’s gravitational field

“The deceleration is accomplished in two steps,” explains Martin Zeppenfeld, who originally devised the concept of the molecular brake. “Initially, the molecules slow down when they pass from the laboratory system to the rotating system.” This is comparable to a father running along next to his child on a rotating carousel. He moves with respect to the environment, but for the child, he’s not moving.

“Additionally, the molecules are exposed to the outwardly directed centrifugal force,” adds Martin Zeppenfeld. “On their way to the center, the particles must surmount a huge mountain, and are continuously decelerated while doing so, until they finally come almost to a standstill.” For comparison: for the particles to experience the same braking effect in the Earth’s gravitational field, they would have to fly 2,000 meters upward.

Some of the methods currently used to decelerate polar molecules use electrodes not only as guiderails, but also as the actual brake. However, with practicable field strengths, the braking effect remains low, requiring that the particles be sent repeatedly to this electrical potential mountain. This not only results in many particles being lost, but they also don’t leave the decelerator in a continuous flow, but rather in the form of particle pulses, or in other words, in batches.

Centrifuge deceleration is versatile and easy to use

“What is new about our centrifuge deceleration is its continuous operation, the large number of molecules in the resulting beams, its application versatility, and its relative ease of handling,” says Gerhard Rempe, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics. In principle, atoms or neutrons can also be decelerated by a centrifugal force. However, these particles aren’t polar and therefore can’t be guided through the centrifuge using an electric field.

The researchers in Garching now want to further cool the centrifuge-decelerated molecules. They aim to do this using Sisyphus cooling, which they just recently developed, and which is suitable for molecules that are already very cold. Here, an electric field decelerates the optically excited molecules. Through a combination of both methods, the researchers obtain a sufficiently dense flow of extremely cold molecules, allowing them to steer them toward one another to create specific collisions and control their chemical reaction. But the extremely cold molecules could also be accumulated to form clouds that could serve as the register of a quantum computer that is particularly fast for certain arithmetic operations. Thus, the closed cold chain for particles opens up completely new perspectives for chemistry and physics.

Publication: S. Chervenkov, et al., “Continuous Centrifuge Decelerator for Polar Molecules,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 013001 (2014); DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.013001

PDF Copy of the Study: Continuous Centrifuge Decelerator for Polar Molecules

Image: MPI of Quantum Optics; Sotir Chervenkov/MPI of Quantum Optics

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Indefinite optical cavities feature a hyperboloid iso-frequency contour that supports ultrahigh optical refractive indices. This cross-section shows the IFC (bronze curves) for a silver/germanium metamaterial with yellow circles representing cavity wave vectors and the green circle representing the light cone of air. Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group

By alternating super-thin multiple layers of silver and germanium, researchers at the Berkeley Lab fabricated an indefinite metamaterial, which they then used to create the first 3D nanoscale optical cavities.

The world’s smallest three-dimensional optical cavities with the potential to generate the world’s most intense nanolaser beams have been created by a scientific team led by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. In addition to nanolasers, these unique optical cavities with their extraordinary electromagnetic properties should be applicable to a broad range of other technologies, including LEDs, optical sensing, nonlinear optics, quantum optics and photonic integrated circuits.

By alternating super-thin multiple layers of silver and germanium, the researchers fabricated an “indefinite metamaterial” from which they created their 3D optical cavities. In natural materials, light behaves the same no matter what direction it propagates. In indefinite metamaterials, light can actually be bent backwards in some directions, a property known as negative refraction. The use of this indefinite metamaterial enabled the scaling down of the 3D optical cavities to extremely deep subwavelength (nanometer) size, resulting in a “hyperboloid iso-frequency contour” of light wave vectors (a measure of magnitude and direction) that supported the highest optical refractive indices ever reported.

This study was directed by Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (SINAM). He is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research titled “Experimental realization of three-dimensional indefinite cavities at the nanoscale with an anomalous scaling law,” which has been published in the journal Nature Photonics. Co-authoring this paper with Zhang were Xiaodong Yang, Jie Yao, Junsuk Rho and Xiaobo Yin.

“Our work opens up a new approach for designing a truly nano-scale optical cavity,” Zhang says. “By using metamaterials, we show intriguing cavity physics that counters conventional wisdom. For example, the quality factor of our optical mode rapidly increases with the decrease of cavity size. The results of this study provide us with a tremendous opportunity to develop high performance photonic devices for communications.”

This schematic shows (a) an indefinite metamaterial structure with alternating silver and germanium multilayers; and (b) its iso-frequency contour of light wave vectors with negative refractions along the x- and y-directions, and positive along the z-direction. Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group

Optical ca Smart Vending  vities are the major components of most lasers. Light confined within an optical cavity will be reflected back and forth between two opposing mirrors to produce a standing wave at a specific resonant frequency. It is from this standing light wave that a laser beam is generated. Optical cavities made from natural materials can be no smaller than the wavelength of the light propagating through them. Metamaterials, however, allow for electromagnetic behavior that is not attainable in nature. Engineered from a combination of metals and dielectrics – insulators that become polarized in the presence of an electromagnetic field – metamaterials derive their optical properties from their structure rather than their chemical composition, as is the case with natural optical materials.

“Due to the unnaturally high refractive index supported in the metamaterials, our 3D cavities can be smaller than one tenth of the optical wavelength,” says Xiaodong Yang, lead author of the Nature Photonics paper who is now with the Missouri University of Science and Technology. “At these nanoscale dimensions, optical cavities compress the optical mode into a tiny space, increasing the photon density of states and thereby enhancing the interactions between light and matter.”

Another advantage of using indefinite metamaterials to make their 3D optical cavities, Yang says, is that cavities with different sizes can have the same resonance frequency, providing more flexibility in the optical cavity design. Another advantage is that the photons lost when light is reflected back and forth – a problem for optical cavities from natural materials – is reduced as the cavity size gets smaller. Yang says this will benefit the desi Wireless ATM Solution  gn of future nanoscale lasers.

Electron micrograph showing arrays of indefinite optical cavities comprised of silver/germanium multilayers. Courtesy of Xiang Zhang group

Germanium was the dielectric chosen to make this metamaterial because it has a relatively high refractive index (about 4.0), compared to air (1.0), which is the dielectric most typically used to make a metamaterial. The alternating layers of silver (20 nanometers thick) and germanium (30 nanometers thick) were cut into cubes of various sizes, depending on the number of metal/dielectric layers. The cube walls tilt into the shape of a trapezoid during the final stage of fabrication with a nano-sized optical cavity in the core.

“ Vending PC  The hyperboloid iso-frequency contour of wave vector space in these cavities allowed us to reach very high wave vector values, Yang says. “As wave vector values are proportional to the refractive index, we were able to record optical refractive indices as large as 17.4, which is far beyond that found in natural materials.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Images: Xiang Zhang Group

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Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have developed edge gatewaya fascinating new theory for how life on Earth may have begun. Their experiments, described today in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrate that key chemical reactions that support life today could have been carried out with ingredients likely present on the planet four billion years ago.

“This was a black box for us,” said Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy, PhD, associate professor of chemistry at TSRI and senior author of the new study. “But if you focus on the chemistry, the questions of origins of life become less daunting.”

For the new study, Krishnamurthy and his coauthors, who are all members of the National Science Foundation/National Aeronautics and Space Administration Center for Chemical Evolution, focused on a series of chemical reactions that make up what researchers refer to as the citric acid cycle.

Every aerobic organism, from flamingoes to fungi, relies on the citric acid cycle to release stored energy in cells. In previous studies, researchers imagined early life using the same molecules for the citric acid cycle telemetry vending machineas life uses today. The problem with that approach, Krishnamurthy explai20ns, is that these biological molecules are fragile and the chemical reactions used in the cycle would not have existed in the first billion years of Earth–the ingredients simply didn’t exist yet.

Leaders of the new study started with the chemical reactions first. They wrote the recipe and then determined which molecules present on early Earth could have worked as ingredients.

The new study outlines how two non-biological cycles–called the HKG cycle and the malonate cycle–could have come together to kick-start a crude version of the citric acid cycle. The two cycles use reactions that perform the same fundamental chemistry of a-ketoacids and b-ketoacids as in the citric acid cycle. These shared reactions include aldol additions, which bring new source molecules into the cycles, as well as beta and oxidative decarboxylations, which release the molecules as carbon dioxide (CO2).

As they ran these reactions, the researchers found they could produce amino acids in addition to CO2, which are also the end products of the citric acid cycle. The researchers think that as biological molecules like enzymes became available, they could have led to the replacement of non-biological molecules in these fundamental reactions to make them more elaborate and efficient.

“The chemistry could have stayed the same over time, it was just the nature of the molecules that changed,” says Krishnamurthy. “The molecules evolved to be more complicated over time based on what biology needed.”

“Modern metabolism has a precursor, a template, that was non-biological,” adds Greg Springsteen, PhD, first author of the new study and associate professor of chemistry at Furman University.

Making these reactions even more plausible is the fact that at the center of these reactions is a molecule called glyoxylate, which studies show could have been availapower line sensorble on early Earth and is part of the citric acid cycle today (called the “Glyoxylate shunt or cycle”).

Krishnamurthy says more research needs to be done to see how these chemical reactions could have become as sustainable as the citric acid cycle is today.

Publication: Greg Springsteen, et al., “Linked Cycles of Oxidative Decarboxylation of Glyoxylate as Protometabolic Analogs of the Citric Acid Cycle,” Nature Communications 9, Article number: 91 (2018) doi:10.1038/s41467-017-02591-0

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Researchers in the journal Science have reported that they can now create a cloak that hides objects from static magnetic fields. There are a multitude of different applications, but some might subvert airport security.

The team was led by Alvaro Sanchez at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, working together with experimental scientists at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, and they’re describing a magnetic cloak that could be made inexpensively with readily available materials.

The interior of the cloak is lined with turns of tape made from a high-temperature superconductor, which can repel magnetic fields. Any magnetic fields enclosed within a superconductor would be undetectable from the outside. However, the superconductor itself can still perturb a magnetic field. To counter this, researchers coated the external side with a ferromagnet.

The two layers now cancel each other out. The antimagnet was tested by using liquid nitrogen to activate the superconductor. It was placed inside a uniform magnetic field, with a strength of 40 millitesla. A Hall probe was used to map the magnetic field and researchers discovered that the field lines m2m cellular routerdid not enter the cloak itself. The exactness of this cloak which could be made perfect, using currently available materials.

A superconductor can cloak a magnet's field, but its own magnetic effects must be offset by a ferromagnetic coating for it to avoid detection

This cloak is simpler than previous invisibility cloaks, since its permeability is isotropic instead of anisotropic, meaning that it has the same value in all directions. The resulting cloak is less than perfect, but it convincingly demonstrated the raw concept and that it can further be improved using existing materials.

The overall cost of this cloak was about €1,000 (US $1,000), which is a small amount when industrial LTE router  it comes to this kind of research. The technology could be used to hide metallic weapons from security portals. However, X-ray machines and sniffer dogs wou m2m iot  ld probably not be defeated by this kind of cloak.

[via Nature]