Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have shown that copper oxide particles on the sub-nanoscale are more powerful catalysts than those on the nanoscale. These subnanoparticles can also catalyze the oxidation reactions of aromatic hydrocarbons far more effectively than catalysts currently used in industry. This study paves the way to better and more efficient utilization of aromatic hydrocarbons, which are important materials for both research and industry.
Researchers at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) report a photo-acid generator (PAG) that generates Lewis acids with a quantum yield that is vastly superior to PAGs that generate Brønsted acids. The new PAG is based on photo-chemical 6π-percyclization and is demonstrated to initiate the polymerization of epoxy monomers and catalyze Mukaiyama-aldol reactions.
PAGs are chemical species that release strong acids, either in solution or solid state, upon exposure to light. These acids can then be used to activate various biological and photo-polymer systems.
A calf was born from an embryo lacking cells which form a large part of the placenta, providing new insight into the regenerative capacity of mammalian embryos.
Mammalian development starts from a single cell -- a fertilized egg. The egg goes through multiple cell divisions to increase its cell numbers and then starts forming a sphere-like structure with a cavity inside, called the blastocyst. The blastocyst consists of two types of cells, the inner cell mass (ICM) and the trophectoderm (TE), which develop into an embryo proper and a large part of the placenta, respectively.
With the deployment of 5G networks throughout 2020, scientists are now focusing their research attentions on 6G communications. This research will need to be human-centric, according to KAUST postdoctoral fellow Shuping Dang.
Dang and his colleagues examined the potential applications and challenges of 6G communications in a study published in Nature Electronics. They found that 6G communications will need to be more secure, protect people's privacy, be ubiquitously accessible and affordable, and safeguard users' mental and physical well-being.
An international research team have for the first time observed dynamic covalent oligomers mimicking the combination of complementary DNA strands, which could lead to exciting developments in electronics and the engineering of interfaces between prostheses and body tissue.
Many greenhouses could become energy neutral by using see-through solar panels to harvest energy - primarily from the wavelengths of light that plants don't use for photosynthesis. Those are the findings of a new modeling study conducted by engineering, plant biology and physics researchers at North Carolina State University.
Scientists at the University of Groningen used a silver sawtooth nanoslit array to produce valley-coherent photoluminescence in two-dimensional tungsten disulfide flakes at room temperature. Until now, this could only be achieved at very low temperatures. Coherent light can be used to store or transfer information in quantum electronics. This plasmon-exciton hybrid device is promising for use in integrated nanophotonics (light-based electronics). The results were published in Nature Communications on 5 February.
As an important branch of quantum computation, topological quantum computation has been drawing extensive attention for holding great advantages such as fault-tolerance. Topological quantum computation is based on the non-Abelian braiding of quantum states, where the non-Abelian braiding in the field of quantum statistics is highly related to the non-locality of the quantum states.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Some 4,ooo years ago, a tiny population of woolly mammoths died out on Wrangel Island, a remote Arctic refuge off the coast of Siberia.
They may have been the last of their kind anywhere on Earth.
To learn about the plight of these giant creatures and the forces that contributed to their extinction, scientists have resurrected a Wrangel Island mammoth's mutated genes. The goal of the project was to study whether the genes functioned normally. They did not.
Topologically stabilized spin structures at the nanoscale magnets, including domain walls, vortices and skyrmions, have recently received much attention. Among the nanoscale non-linear spin textures, vortex is a typical and well-known magnetic domain in dimensionally confined systems with a symmetry determined by its polarity and chirality. Because of its stability at the nanoscale and its robust control on nanosecond timescales, the magnetic vortex can be a promising candidate for next-generation magnetic data-storage devices [1].