One of the key steps in developing new materials is property identification, which has long relied on massive amounts of experimental data and expensive equipment, limiting research efficiency. A KAIST research team has introduced a new technique that combines physical laws, which govern deformation and interaction of materials and energy, with artificial intelligence. This approach allows for rapid exploration of new materials even under data-scarce conditions and provides a foundation for accelerating design and verification across multiple engineering fields, including materials, mechanics, energy, and electronics.
In an approach reminiscent of the classic board game "Battleship," Stanford researchers have discovered a way to characterize the microscopic structure of everyday materials such as sand and concrete with high precision.
A cell can act in astonishingly complex ways. It must decide for itself whether to grow and multiply, rest, specialize, age or die. This applies just as much to mammalian cells as it does to seemingly simple microbes.
Changing interactions between the smallest particles at the touch of a button: Quantum researchers at RPTU have developed a new tool that makes this possible. The new approach—a temporally oscillating magnetic field—has the potential to significantly expand fundamental knowledge in the field of quantum physics. It also opens completely new perspectives on the development of new materials.
Hippos, today restricted to sub-Saharan Africa, survived in central Europe far longer than previously assumed. Analyses of bone finds demonstrate that hippos inhabited the Upper Rhine Graben sometime between approximately 47,000 and 31,000 years ago, well into the last ice age. An international research team led by the University of Potsdam and the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim with the Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie have now published a study on this in the journal Current Biology.
Ice cream comes in many different flavors. But even pure ice, which consists only of water molecules, has been discovered to exist in more than 20 different solid forms or phases that differ in the arrangement of the molecules. The phases are named with Roman numerals, like ice I, ice II or ice III. Now, researchers led by scientists from the Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) have identified and described a new phase called ice XXI. The results are published in the journal Nature Materials.
Many survey-based studies have been conducted to try to understand how happiness changes over a person's lifetime. While there have been a few different outcomes, the most common has been the U-shaped curve. This pattern indicates that, on average, people are happier at the beginning of adulthood, they experience a dip during midlife (the so-called "midlife crisis"), and happiness then increases again in old age. Yet, other similar studies have reported inconsistent patterns—steady happiness throughout life, steady increases, steady decreases or even inverse U-shapes.
In a recent study, mathematicians from Freie Universität Berlin have demonstrated that planar tiling, or tessellation, is much more than a way to create a pretty pattern. Consisting of a surface covered by one or more geometric shapes with no gaps and no overlaps, tessellations can also be used as a precise tool for solving complex mathematical problems.
Marine microalgae are vital drivers of Earth's carbon cycle, contributing approximately half of the planet's global primary production and sequestering tens of gigatons of carbon annually through photosynthesis. To survive and thrive in seawater with low carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, these microorganisms depend on specialized and efficient CO2-concentrating mechanisms (CCMs). For years, the regulatory factors that trigger CCM activation have remained incompletely understood—until recent scientific research began to unravel this biological process.
Arctic seals are being pushed closer to extinction by climate change and more than half of bird species around the world are declining under pressure from deforestation and agricultural expansion, according to an annual assessment from the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
A research team led by Prof. Lin Yiheng from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), collaborating with Prof. Yuan Haidong from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, succeeded in generating multipartite quantum entangled states across two, three, and five modes using controlled dissipation as a resource. Their study is published in Science Advances.
A research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has constructed a copper (Cu) single-atom catalyst (Cu-N3 SAs) with a nitrogen-coordination structure. They used two-dimensional g-C3N4, derived from melamine pyrolysis, as a carrier to achieve efficient electrocatalytic urea synthesis under mild conditions.
Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and ferroelectrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: They switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control.
Compounds emitted by trees, diterpenes, could have a previously unconsidered impact on the formation of particles in the atmosphere.
Inspired by ancient Roman concrete techniques, a team led by Prof. Ma Xiao from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) developed a novel low-cost, highly durable calcium-silicate-hydrate-based grouting material for grotto conservation. Their research is published in Advanced Science.
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