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This view from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows part of an area on Mars where narrow rock ridges, some as tall as a 16-story building, intersect at angles forming corners of polygons.

A new study on polygon-forming ridges on Mars examines the Medusae Fossae region straddling the planet’s equator and similar-looking networks in other regions of the Red Planet.

Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The simplest explanation for these impressive ridges is that lava flowed into pre-existing fractures in the ground and later resisted erosion better than material around IoT PLC access them.

“Finding these ridges in the Medusae Fossae region set me on a quest to find all the types of polygonal ridges on Mars,” said Laura Kerber of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, lead author of the survey report published this month in the journal Icarus.

The pattern is sometimes called boxwork ridges. Raised lines intersect as the outlines of multiple adjoining rectangles, pentagons, triangles or other polygons. Despite the similarity in shape, these networks differ in origin and vary in scale from inches to miles.

Small and Large Examples

Mars rover missions have found small versions they have been able to inspect up close. Some of these polygonal ridges, such as at “Garden City” seen  secure web based scada  by Curiosity, are veins deposited by mineral-laden groundwater moving through underground fissures, long before erosion exposed the veins. Curiosity recently also imaged small boxwork ridges that likely originated as mud cracks.

At the other end of the size scale, ridges outline several rectangles each more than a mile (more than 2 kilometers) wide at a location called “Inca City” near Mars’ south pole. These may have resulted from impact-related faults underground, with fractures filled by rising lava that hardened and was later exposed by erosion.

“Polygonal ridges can be formed in several different ways, and some of them are really key to understanding the history of early Mars,” Kerber said. “Many of these ridges are mineral veins, and mineral veins tell us that water was circulating underground.”

Pol Vending Telemetry  ygonal ridges in the Nilosyrtis Mensae region of northern Mars may hold clues about ancient wet, possibly warm environments. Examples of them found so far tend to be in the same areas as water-related clues such as minerals that form in hot springs, clay-mineral layers and channels carved by ancient streams. A larger sample is needed to test this hypothesis.

Volunteers Sought

Kerber is seeking help from the public through a citizen-science project using images of Mars from the Context Camera (CTX) on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

“We’re asking for volunteers to search for more polygonal ridges,” she said. Finding as-yet-unidentified polygonal ridges in CTX images could improve understanding about their relationship to other features and also will help guide future observations with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera to reveal details of the ridge networks.

This citizen-science program, called Planet Four: Ridges, began January 17 on a platform released by the Zooniverse, which hosts dozens of projects that enlist people worldwide to contribute to discoveries in fields ranging from astronomy to zoology. More information is at:p>

Other Zooniverse Mars projects using data from CTX and HiRISE have drawn participation from more than 150,000 volunteers.

On Earth, too, polygonal ridges have diverse origins. Examples include grand walls of lava that hardened underground then were exposed by erosion, and small ridge networks inside limestone caves, where erosion can be chemical as well as physical.

With CTX, HiRISE and four other instruments, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been investigating Mars since 2006.

Publication: Laura Kerber, et al., “Polygonal ridge networks on Mars: Diversity of morphologies and the special case of the Eastern Medusae Fossae Formation,” Icarus Volume 281, 1 January 2017, Pages 200–219; doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2016.08.020

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Animations of supercomputer data take you to the inner zone of the accretion disk of a black hole.

Astrophysicists re-create and explain nearly all the components wireless router  seen in the X-ray spectra of stellar-mass black holes.

Black holes may be dark, but the areas around them definitely are not. These dense, spinning behemoths twist up gas and matter just outside their event horizon, and generate heat and energy that gets radiated, in part, as light. And when black holes merge, they produce a bright intergalactic burst that may act as a beacon for their collision.

Astrophysicists became deeply interested in black holes in the 1960s, but the idea of their event horizon was first intimated in a paper by Karl Schwarzschild published after Einstein introduced general relativity in 1915.

Knowledge about black holes–these still-unseen objects–has grown tremendously in recent years. Part of this growth comes from researchers’ ability to use detailed numerical models and powerful supercomputers to simulate the complex dynamics near a black hole. This is no trivial matter. Warped spacetime, gas pressure, ionizing radiation, magnetized plasma–the list of phenomena that must be included in an accurate simulation goes on and on.

“It’s not something that you want to do with a paper and pencil,” said Scott Noble, an astrophysicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).

This animation of supercomputer data takes you to the inner zone of the accretion disk of a stellar-mass black hole. Gas heated to 20 million degrees F as it spirals toward the black hole glows in low-energy, or soft, X-rays. Just before the gas plunges to the center, its orbital motion is approaching the speed of light. X-rays up to hundreds of times more powerful (“harder”) than those in the disk arise from the corona, a region of tenuous and much hotter gas around the disk. Coronal temperatures reach billions of degrees. The event horizon is the boundary where all trajectories, including those of light, must go inward. Nothing, not even light, can pass outward across the event horizon and escape the black hole. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman, J. Krolik (JHU) and S. Noble (RIT). Music: “Lost in Space” by Lars Leonhard, courtesy of artist.

Working with Jeremy Schnittman of Goddard Space Flight Center and Julian Krolik of Johns Hopkins University, Noble and his colleagues created a new tool that predicts the light that an accreting black hole would produce. They did so by modeling how photons hit gas particles in the disk around the black hole (also known as an accretion disk), generating light–specifically light in the X-ray spectrum–and producing signals detected with today’s most powerful telescopes.

In their June 2013 paper in the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers presented the results of a new global radiation transport code coupled to a relativistic simulation of an accreting, non-rotating black hole. For the first time, they were able to re-create and explain nearly all the components seen in the X-ray spectra of stellar-mass black holes.

The ability to generate realistic light signals from a black hole simulation is a first and brings with it the possibility of explaining a whole host of observations taken with multiple X-ray satellites during the past 40 years.

“We felt excited and also incredibly lucky, like we’d turned up ten heads in a row,” Noble said. “The simulations are very challenging and if you don’t get it just right, it won’t give you an accurate answer. This was the first time that people have put all of the pieces together from first principles in such a thorough way.”

The simulations are the combined results of two computational codes. One, Harm3d, re-creates the three-dimensional dynamics of a black hole accreting gas, including its  web SCADA  magnetohydrodynam cashless vending  ics (MHD), which charts the interplay of electrically conducting fluids like plasmas and a powerful magnetic field.

“The magnetic field is important in the area outside the black hole because it whips the gas around and can dictate its dynamics,” Noble said. “Also, the movement of the field can lead to it kinking and trigger a reconnection event that produces an explosive burst of energy, turning magnetic field energy into heat.”

Though the MHD forces are critical near the black hole, it is the X-rays these forces generate that can be observed. The second component, a radiative transport code called Pandurata, simulates what real photons do.

“They bounce around inside the gas, they reflect off the disk’s surface, and their wavelengths change along the way,” he explained. “Eventually, they reach some distant light collector–a numerically approximated observer–which provides the predicted light output of our simulation.”

The researchers’ simulations were run on the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, built with support from the National Science Foundation, which also funded the group’s research.

The simulations were the highest resolution thin disk simulations ever performed, with the most points and the smallest length-scales for numerical cells, allowing the researchers to resolve very small features. Varying only the rate at which the black holes accrete gas, they were able to reproduce the wide range of X-ray states seen in observations of most galactic black hole sources.

This illustration shows the approximate relationships between the black hole, its accretion disk and the corona region (blue). The arrows show a soft X-ray (red) traveling into the corona and striking a particle moving near the speed of light. The collision scatters the light and boosts it to much higher energy, making it a hard X-ray. This process is known as inverse Compton scattering.

With each passing year, the significance of black holes–and their role in shaping the cosmos–grows.

Nearly every good-sized galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, said Julian Krolik, a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. For periods of a few to tens of million years at a time, black holes accrete incredible amounts of gas ultimately released as huge amounts of energy–as much as a hundred times the power output of all the stars in a black hole host galaxy put together.

“Some of that energy can travel out into their surrounding galaxies as ionizing light or fast-moving jets of ionized gas,” Krolik continued. “As a result, so much heat can be deposited in the gas orbiting around in those galaxies that it dramatically alters the way they make new stars. It’s widely thought that processes like this are largely responsible for regulating how many stars big galaxies hold.”

In this way black holes may act as cosmic regulators–all the more reason to use numerical simulations to uncover further clues about how black holes interact with gas, stars and other supermassive black holes.

Said Noble: “To see that it works and reproduces the observational data when the observational data is so complicated…it’s really remarkable.”

Publication: Jeremy D. Schnittman, et al., “X-Ray Spectra from Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Accreting Black Holes,” 2013, ApJ, 769, 156; doi:10.1088/0004-637X/769/2/156

PDF Copy of the Study: X-ray Spectra from MHD Simulations of Accreting Black Holes

Images: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/J. Schnittman, J. Krolik (JHU) and S. Noble (RIT)

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A canister of liquid helium inside the blue cylinder allowed researchers to experiment with tiny electron bubbles only 3.6 nanometers in diameter. The work suggests that the wave function of an electron can be split and parts of it trapped in smaller bubbles. Photo: Mike Cohea/Brown University

A newly published study from Brown University suggests that the quantum state of an electron — the electron’s wave function — can be shattered into pieces and trapped.

Providence, Rhode Island (Brown University) — New research by physicists from Brown University puts the profound strangeness of quantum mechanics in a nutshell — or, more accurately, in a helium bubble.

Experiments led by Humphrey Maris, professor of physics at Brown, suggest that the quantum state of an electron — the electron’s wave function — can be shattered into pieces and those pieces can be trapped in tiny bubbles of liquid helium. To be clear, the researchers are not saying that the electron can be broken apart. Electrons are elementary particles, indivisible and unbreakable. But what the researchers are saying is in some ways more bizarre.

In quantum mechanics, particles do not have a distinct position in space. Instead, they exist as a wave function, a probability distribution that includes all the possible locations where a particle might be found. Maris and his colleagues are suggesting that parts of that distribution can be separated and cordoned off from each other.

“We are trapping the chance of finding the electron, not pieces of the electron,” Maris said. “It’s a little like a lottery. When lottery tickets are sold, everyone who buys a ticket gets a piece of paper. So all these people are holding a chance and you can consider that the chances are spread all over the place. But there is only one prize — one electron — and where that prize will go is determined later.”

If Maris’s interpretation of his experimental findings is correct, it raises profound questions about the measurement process in quantum mechanics. In the traditional formulation of quantum mechanics, when a particle is measured — meaning it is found to be in one particular location — the wave function is said to collapse.

“The experiments we have performed indicate that the mere interaction of an electron with some larger physical system, such as a bath of liquid helium, does not constitute a measurement,” Maris said. “The question then is: What does?”

And the fact that the wave function can be split into two or more bubbles is strange as well. If a detector finds the electron in one bubble, what happens to the other bubble?

“It really raises all kinds of interesting questions,” Maris said.

The new research is published in the Journal of Low Temperature Physics.

Electron bubbles

Scientists have wondered for years about the strange behavior of electrons in liquid helium cooled to near absolute zero. When an electron enters the liquid, it repels surrounding helium atoms, forming a bubble in the liquid about 3.6 nanometers across. The size of the bubble is determined by the pressure of the electron pushing against the surface tension of the helium. The strangeness, however, arises in experiments dating back to the 1960s looking at how the bubbles move.

In the experiments, a pulse of electrons enters the top of a helium-filled tube, and a detector registers the electric charge delivere Vending Telemeter  d when electron bubbles reach the bottom of the tube. Because the bubbles have a well-defined size, they should all experience the same amount of drag as they move, and should therefore arrive at the detector at the same time. But that’s not what happens. Experiments have detected unidentified objects that reach the detector before the normal electron bubbles. Over the years, scientists have cataloged 14 distinct objects of different sizes, all of which seem to move faster than an electron bubble would be expected to move.

“They’ve been a mystery ever since they were first detected,” Maris said. “Nobody has a good explanation.”

Several possibilities have been proposed. The unknown objects could be impurities in the helium—charged particles knocked free from the walls of the container. Another possibility is that the objects could be helium ions — helium atoms that have picked up one or more extra electrons, which produce a negative charge at the detector.

But Maris and his colleagues, including Nobel laureate and Brown physicist Leon Cooper, believe a new set of experiments puts those explanations to rest.

New experiments

The researchers performed a series of electron bubble mobility experiments with much greater sensitivity than previous efforts. They were able to detect all 14 of the objects from previous work, plus four additional objects that appeared frequently over the course of the experiments. But in addition to those 18 objects that showed up frequently, the study revealed countless additional objects that appeared more rarely.

In effect, Maris says, it appears there aren’t just 18 objects, but an effectively infinite number of them, with a “continuous distribution of sizes” up to the size of the normal electron bubble.

“That puts a dagger in the idea that these are impurities or helium ions,” Maris said. “It would be hard to imagine that there would be that many impurities, or that many previously unknown helium ions.”

The only way the researchers can think of to explain the results is through “fission” of the wave function. In certain situations, the researchers surmise, electron wave functions break apart upon entering the liquid, and pieces of the wave function are caught in separate bubbles. Because the bubbles contain less than the full wave function, they’re smaller than normal electron bubbles and therefore move faster.

In their new paper, Maris and his team lay out a mechanism by which fission could happen that is supported by quantum theory and is in good agreement with the experimental results. The mechanism involves a concept in quantum mechanics known as reflection above the barrier.

In the case of electrons and helium, it works like this: When an electron hits the surface of the liquid helium, there’s some chance that it will cross into the liquid,  Cost effective  and some chance that it will bounce off and carom away. In quantum mechanics, those possibilities are expressed as part of the wave function crossing the barrier, and part of it being reflected. Perhaps the small electron bubbles are formed by the portion of the wave function that goes through the surface. The size of the bubble depends on how much wave function goes through, which would explain the continuous distribution of small electron bubble sizes detected in the experiments.

The idea that part of the wave function is reflected at a barrier is standard quantum mechanics, Cooper said. “I don’t think anyone would argue with that,” he said. “The non-standard part is that the piece of the wave function that goes through can have a physical effect by influencing the size of the bubble. That is what is radically new here.”

Further, the researchers propose what happens after the wave function enters the liquid. It’s a bit like putting a droplet of oil in a puddle of water. “Sometime your drop of oil forms one bubble,” Maris said, “Sometimes it forms two, sometimes 100.”

There are elements within quantum theory that suggest a tendency for the wave function to break up into specific sizes. By Maris’s calculations, the specific sizes one might expect to see correspond roughly to the 18 frequently occurring electron bubble sizes.

“We think this offers t ul certified  he best explanation for what we see in the experiments,” Maris said. We’ve got this body of data that goes back 40 years. The experiments are not wrong; they’ve been done by multiple people. We have a tradition called Occam’s razor, where we try to come up with the simplest explanation. This, so far as we can tell, is it.”

But it does raise some interesting questions that sit on the border of science and philosophy. For example, it’s necessary to assume that the helium does not make a measurement of the actual position of the electron. If it did, any bubble found not to contain the electron would, in theory, simply disappear. And that, Maris says, points to one of the deepest mysteries of quantum theory.

“No one is sure what actually constitutes a measurement. Perhaps physicists can agree that someone with a Ph.D. wearing a white coat sitting in the lab of a famous university can make measurements. But what about somebody who really isn’t sure what they are doing? Is consciousness required? We don’t really know.”

Authors on the paper in addition to Maris were former Brown postdoctoral researcher Wanchun Wei, graduate student Zhuolin Xie, and George Seidel, professor emeritus of physics.

Publication: W. Wei, et al., “Study of Exotic Ions in Superfluid Helium and the Possible Fission of the Electron Wave Function,” Journal of Low Temperature Physics, 2014; DOI:10.1007/s10909-014-1224-3

Image: Mike Cohea/Brown University

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Artistic rendering of copper sulfide above the critical temperature at which it becomes “superionic.” Click on image for expanded view and description. Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

A new study from SLAC and Stanford researchers examines the atomic-scale details of how superionic nanoscale materials switch from a state that is poorly conducting to one that is highly conducting, taking a step forward toward using these materials in low-cost solid-state electrical batteries.

A material that could enable faster memory chips and more efficient batteries can switch between high and low ionic conductivity states much faster than previously thought, SLAC and Stanford researchers have determined. The key is to use extremely small chunks of it.

“Our result is a step toward using this material, copper sulfide, in low-cost solid-state electrical batteries,” said the leader of the research team, Aaron Lindenberg, of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences and the Stanford PULSE Institute. The institutes are run jointly by SLAC and Stanford.

“For the first time, we’ve seen the atomic-scale details of exactly how these nanoscale materials transform, or switch, from a state that is poorly conducting to one that is highly conducting,” he said. “And what we’ve learned gives us confidence about our ability to tune its structure and properties to be useful in new technologies.”

Lindenberg’s team reported its results last month in Nature Communications.

Copper sulfide is a “su Prognostics and Health Management  perionic” solid material: When heated above a critical temperature it suddenly conducts current, in the form of ions moving through the material, much more readily than at lower temperatures. This transition into a superionic phase has fascinated researchers since the 1830s, when it was first described by the famous British scientist Michael Faraday.

With recent advances in nanoscience, scientists have learned that smaller pieces of superionic material have lower critical temperatures and may also switch states much faster. For instance, a centimeter-sized piece of copper sulfide becomes an excellent conductor when heated above 103 degrees Centigrade, but its fastest recorded switching times occur on a scale of millionths of a second.

In the most recent advance, Lindenberg’s team found that much tinier nanodisks of copper sulfide, just 10 nanometers (10 billionths of a meter) across, switched at lower temperatures – about 70 degrees C. – and can be controlled by light to switch in only 20 trillionths of a second, a million times faster than previously observed.

cost-effective industrial LTE router  Superionic materials typically have two constituents – in this case, copper and sulfur –whose structures are intertwined. The new report shows in exquisite detail what happens inside the material when the critical temperature is reached, and indicates a connection between the time it takes for switching to occur and the motion of the ions through the superionic material when it’s at equilibrium.

“This paper presents the first experimental measurements capturing a superionic nanocrystal as it transforms and the associated changes within the transition state itself,” Lindenberg said. “We were surprised how quickly the crystal form and volume changed.”

Now that they know the details of the superionic transformation, Lindenberg says his team has ideas for synthesizing new classes of superionic materials that are stable at room temperature, as well as for exploring the way ions are transported through the material and how the associated transitions from one phase to another take place.

Such an improvement could enable copper sulfide to be used as a key element in new classes of r smart vending  esistive switching devices and as a safe, efficient solid-state replacement for the liquid electrolyte that transports ions between the electrodes of a rechargeable battery.

The researchers conducted their experiments at three synchrotrons: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source, Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Photon Source and SLAC’s Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. The paper’s first author, Stanford graduate student Tim Miller, received the 2012 Melvin P. Klein Scientific Development Award last fall for his work on this project.

Publication: T. A. Miller, et al., “The mechanism of ultrafast structural switching in superionic copper (I) sulphide nanocrystals,” Nature Communications 4, Article number: 1369; doi:10.1038/ncomms2385

Image: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

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In photo: vials containing host materials and the guest materials of the solar cells (courtesy of the Transformative Materials and Devices Lab)

Engineers from the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale University have developed a solar cell that widens the choice of colors without decreasing its power conversion efficiency.

The technology of solar energy has progressed dramatically in the last few decades, as it operates with increasing efficiency and at lower costs.

But the matter of how solar panels look remains an obstacle. Most photovoltaic panels are blue or black and cover large portions of buildings with a monotone hue. That might not jibe with your personal taste – or that of your homeowners’ association. It’s a limitation that has hindered the integration of solar energy into some commercial applications. In fact, architects and designers have long requested a wider choice of colors for solar cells to allow them to sea Verizon Embedded router mlessly blend into a building’s façade or an electronic system.

Up to now, however, expanding the palette of colors that solar energy engineers can work with has proven notoriously difficult. That could be changing, though, with work from the lab of Andre Taylor, associate professor of chemical & environmental engineering. Researchers there have developed a solar cell that widens the choice of colors without decreasing its power conversi retail  on efficiency. Their findings are published in Nano Energy.

Researchers have previously tried a few methods to vary the colors of solar panels. One approach involved adjusting a layer of the solar cell so that it would reflect different colors – this has proved to be costly and with limited results, however. Another method introduced what’s known as a “dye molecule” to allow for more colors. This approach, however, diminishes the efficiency at which the system converts sunlight to energy.

The research team in Taylor’s Transformative Materials and Devices Lab also used a dye molecule, but this one doesn’t diminish the power conversion efficiency. Jaemin Kong, a post-doctoral associate and lead author of the paper, explains that this is because the molecule – a squaraine known as ASSQ – acts not only as a color agent, but as an energy transfer donor. It works in conjunction with two polymers – one that serves as an electron donor and the other as a non intelligent traffic enforcement  -fullerene electron acceptor. By changing the ratios of those three elements, the researchers were able to make adjustments that allowed for a gradual color variation from blue-green to purple-red.

“I think that’s a pretty impressive part of this paper – there was no major sacrifice of the power conversion efficiency,” Taylor said. “And the nice thing about this is that the dye can be used at low concentrations, so it doesn’t necessarily affect the overall mechanism.”

Other authors of the paper are Megan Mohadjer Beromi, Marina Mariano,Tenghooi Goh, Francisco Antonio, and Nilay Hazari.

Publication: Jaemin Konga, et al., “Colorful polymer solar cells employing an energy transfer dye molecule,” Nano Energy, Volume 38, August 2017, Pages 36–42; doi:10.1016/j.nanoen.2017.05.032

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Artist’s concept of researchers heating gold nanoparticles inside of a cell with a laser and monitoring diamond sensors to measure temperature. This image is not to scale. Credit: Steven H. Lee

DARPA researchers have developed new techniques that allow them to measure and control the temperature in living cells. The techniques could support thermal management, control of chemical reactions and development of new research tools.

How do you take  Industrial Wireless M2M Router the temperature of a cell? The familiar thermometer from a doctor’s office is slightly too big considering the average human skin cell  Industrial LTE Router  is only 30 millionths of a meter wide. But the capability is significant; developing the right technology to gauge and control the internal temperatures of cells and other nanospaces might open the door to a number of defense and medical applications: better thermal management of electronics, monitoring the structural integrity of high-performance materials cashless vending  , cell-specific treatment of disease and new tools for medical research.

A team of researchers working on DARPA’s Quantum-Assisted Sensing and Readout (QuASAR) program recently demonstrated sub-degree temperature measurement and control at the nanometer scale inside living cells. The QuASAR team, led by researchers from Harvard University, described its techniques in a Nature paper titled “Nanometer scale quantum thermometry in a living cell.”

To measure temperature, the researchers used imperfections engineered into diamond, known as nitrogen-vacancy (NV) color centers, as nanoscale thermometers. Each NV center can capture an electron, such that the center behaves like an isolated atom trapped in the solid diamond. Changes in temperature cause the lattice structure of the diamond to expand or contract, similar to the way the surface of a bridge does when exposed to hot or cold weather. These shifts in the lattice induce changes in the spin properties of the trapped atoms, which researchers measure using a laser-based technique. The result is that scientists can now monitor sub-degree variations over a large range of temperatures in both organic and inorganic systems at length scales as low as 200 nanometers. For a sense of scale, see: content/begin/cells/scale/.

Confocal scan of a single cell. The white cross corresponds to the position of the gold nanoparticle used for heating, while the red and blue circles represent the location of diamond sensors used for thermometry. The dotted white line outlines the cell membrane.

The diamond sensors are themselves only 100 nanometers in diameter. Each one contains multiple NV centers (the QuASAR team engineered 500 NV centers into each), and multiple sensors can be embedded in a single cell using nanowires. Given the extremely small size of the diamond sensors and their temperature sensitivity, researchers can accurately measure temperature within areas smaller than one percent of the total area of a cell.

The QuASAR team also demonstrated control and mapping of temperature gradients at the subcellular level by implanting gold nanoparticles into a human cell alongside the diamond sensors. The 100-nanometer-diameter nanoparticles were then heated using a separate laser. By varying the power of the heating laser and the concentration of gold nanoparticles, the researchers were able to modify and characterize (using the diamond sensors) the local thermal environment around the cell. In particular, they were able to verify that the heating was localized near the gold nanoparticles and that the cell did not experience an overall ambient rise in temperature.

Although the cell is the smallest unit of life, it is by no means simple. The human body is made up of tens of trillions of cells like this one, that have developed a highly synchronized set of components to carry out the processes that keep the organism alive, allow it to reproduce and adapt to changing environments. Courtesy: National Science Foundation

The team’s findings have several potential applications and could lead to additional areas of study:

The temperature-measurement technique could provide insight into organic and inorganic systems, informing subjects like heat dissipation in integrated circuits and thermal properties of musculoskeletal restoration or inflammation following physical exertion; Because the techniques have been shown to be effective up to temperatures of 600 degrees Kelvin, they could allow for monitoring of nanoscale cracking and degradation caused by temperature gradients in materials and components operating at high temperatures; The intrinsic chemical inertness of diamond may allow for direct microscopic monitoring and control of chemical reactions.

“This research provides another example of how the extreme precision and control of atomic physics techniques can impact sensing applications. It demonstrates that the novel measurement tools being developed under QuASAR can provide new capabilities to the Department of Defense and the broader scientific community at scales that have not previously been possible,” said Jamil Abo-Shaeer, DARPA program manager for QuASAR. “We plan to keep exploring applications for quantum sensors for the measurement of temperature, magnetic and electric fields, and the development of compact optical atomic clocks. We see this work as a jumping off point for whole new areas of research and development.”

Publication: G. Kucsko, et al., “Nanometre-scale thermometry in a living cell,” Nature 500, 54–58, 01 August 2013; doi:10.1038/nature12373

Images: Steven H. Lee; National Science Foundation

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This photo shows an array of 1-mm-wide by 2-cm-long single-crystal organic semiconductors. The neatly aligned blue strips are what provide greater electric charge mobility. The Stanford logo shown here is the same size as a dime. Credit: Y. Diao, B. C-K. Tee, et al.

Using a new a printing process called FLUENCE (fluid-enhanced crystal engineering), researchers have developed highly aligned single-crystalline organic semiconductor thin films that are capable of conducting electricity 10 times more efficiently than those created using conventional methods.

Menlo Park, California — Through innovations to a printing process, researchers have made major improvements to organic electronics—a technology in demand for lightweight, low-cost solar cells, flex wireless atm  ible electronic displays and tiny sensors. The printing method is fast and works with a variety of organic materials to produce semiconductors of strikingly higher quality than what has so far been achieved with similar methods.

Organic electronics have great promise for a variety of applications, but even the highest quality films available today fall short in how well they conduct electrical current. The team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have developed a printing process they call FLUENCE—fluid-enhanced crystal engineering—that for some materials results in thin films capable of conducting electricity 10 times more efficiently than those created using conventional methods.

“Even better, most of the concepts behind FLUENCE can scale up to meet industry requirements,” said Ying Diao, a SLAC/Stanford postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the study, which appeared today in Nature Materials.

Stefan Mannsfeld, a SLAC materials physicist and one of the principal investigators of the experiment, said the key was to focus on the physics of the printing process rather than the chemical makeup of the semiconductor. Diao engineered the process to produce strips of big, neatly aligned crystals that electrical charge can flow through easily, while preservin Industrial Wireless M2M Router g the benefits of the “strained  Industrial IoT Router/Gateway  lattice” structure and “solution shearing” printing technique previously developed in the lab of Mannsfeld’s co-principal investigator, Professor Zhenan Bao of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a joint SLAC-Stanford institute.

This image shows a simulation, called a “streamline representation,” of the organic semiconductor solution flowing around the micropillars and mixing in the spaces below. The colors indicate different speeds for the solution as it passes the micropillars and gets mixed behind them: deep blue is 0 mm/s, all the way up to red for 1.3 mm/s. Credit: Y. Diao et al.

To make the advance, Diao focused on controlling the flow of the liquid in which the organic material is dissolved. “It’s a vital piece of the puzzle,” she said. If the ink flow does not distribute evenly, as is often the case during fast printing, the semiconducting crystals will be riddled with defects. “But in this field there’s been little research done on controlling fluid flow.”

Diao designed a printing blade with tiny pillars embedded in it that mix the ink so it forms a uniform film. She also engineered a way around another problem: the tendency of crystals to randomly form across the substrate. A series of cleverly designed chemical patterns on the substrate suppress the formation of unruly crystals that would otherwise grow out of alignment with the printing direction. The result is a film of large, well-aligned crystals.

X-ray studies of the group’s organic semiconductors at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) allowed them to inspect their progress and continue to make improvements, eventually showing neatly arranged crystals at least 10 times longer than crystals created with other solution-based techniques, and of much greater structural perfection.

The group also repeated the experiment using a second organic semiconductor material with a significantly different molecular structure, and again they saw a notable improvement in the quality of the film. They believe this is a sign the techniques will work across a variety of materials.

Principal investigators Bao and Mannsfeld say the next step for the group is pinning down the underlying relationship between the material and the process that enabled such a stellar result. Such a discovery could provide an unprecedented degree of control over the electronic properties of printed films, optimizing them for the devices that will use them.

“That could lead to a revolutionary advance in organic electronics,” Bao said. “We’ve been making excellent progress, but I think we’re only just scratching the surface.”

Other study co-authors included researchers from Stanford University’s departments of chemistry and chemical and electrical engineering and Nanjing University. The research was supported by SLAC’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program. SSRL is a national user facility operated by Stanford University on behalf of the DOE’s Office of Science.

Cross-polarized optical micrograph comparing a sample of an organic semiconducting film created without micropillars (top) and with micropillars (bottom) at scales of both one millimeter and 50 micrometers. Note the uniformity of the crystals in the bottom image as compared to the images in the top. Credit: Y. Diao et al.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. To learn more, please visit www.slac.stanford.edu.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Publication: Ying Diao, et al., “Solution coating of large-area organic semiconductor thin films with aligned single-crystalline domains,” Nature Materials (2013); doi:10.1038/nmat3650

Images: Y. Diao et al.

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“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. Image from iStock .

Say goodbye to fast-food burgers and hello to fresh garden salads. While observing 37,698 men for up to 22 years and 83,644 women for up to 28 years, a new study found that regular consumption of red meat, particula WiFi M2M Router rly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk.

A new study by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers has found that red meat consumption is associated with an increased risk of total, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality. The results also showed that substituting other healthy protein sources, such as fish, poultry, nuts, and legumes, was associated with a lower risk of mortality.

“Our study adds more evidence to the health risks of eating high amounts of red meat, which has been associated with type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and certain cancers in other studies,” said lead author An Pan, research fellow in the Department of Nutrition at HSPH.

The study was published online in Archives of Internal Medicine.

The researchers, including senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at HSPH, and colleagues, prospectively observed 37,698 men from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study for up to 22 years and 83,644 women in the Nurses’ Health Study for up to 28 years who were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline. Their diets were assessed through questionnaires every four years.

A combined 23,926 deaths were documented in the two studies, of which 5,910 were from cardiovascular disease and 9,464 from cancer. Regular consumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, was associated with increased mortality risk. One daily serving of unprocessed red meat (about the size of a deck of cards) was associated with a 13 percent increased risk of mortality, and one daily serving of processed red meat (one hot dog or two slices of bacon) was associated with a 20 percent increased risk.

Among specific causes, the corresponding increases in risk were 18 percent and 21 percent for cardiovascular mortality, and 10 percent and 16 percent for cancer mortality. These analyses took into account chronic disease risk factors such as age, body mass index, physical ac 4g router tivity, and family history of heart disease or major cancers.

Red meat, especially processed meat, contains ingredients that have been linked to increased risk of chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. These include heme iron, saturated fat, sodium, nitrites, and certain carcinogens that are formed during cooking.

Replacing one serving of total red meat with one serving of a healthy protein source was associated with a lower mortality risk: 7 percent for fish, 14 percent for poultry, 19 percent for nuts, 10 percent for legumes, 10 percent for low-fat dairy products, and 14 percent for whole grains. The researchers estimated that 9.3 percent of deaths in men and 7.6 percent in women could have been prevented at the end of the follow-up if all the participants had consumed less than 0.5 servings per day of red meat.

“This study provides clear evidence that regular consumption of red meat, especially processed meat, contributes substantially to premature death,” said Hu. “On the other hand, choosing more healthful sources of protein in place of red VPN router   meat can confer significant health benefits by reducing chronic disease morbidity and mortality.”

Support for the study was provided by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Cancer Institute.

Other HSPH authors include Qi Sun, Adam Bernstein, JoAnn Manson, Meir Stampfer, and Walter Willett.

Image: iStock, Harvard Gazette