NEWS RELEASES

Researchers have created a microscopic device that can both detect and control the rapid “dance” of electron spins in antiferromagnetic materials — a leap that could enable a new generation of ultrafast, energy-efficient electronics. Until now, scientists could only detect this quantum behavior using bulky lab equipment — making it hard to imagine practical uses in everyday tech.

Penn professors Masoud Akbarzadeh of the Weitzman School and Shu Yang of the School of Engineering and Applied Science have created a 3D concrete printing system that boosts both carbon capture and structural performance. “It wasn’t just about aesthetics or reducing mass,” Akbarzadeh says. “It was about unlocking a new structural logic. We could reduce material by almost 70% and still carry the load, showing it’s possible to do so much more with so much less.”

In two papers, one released today in Nature Materials and a second on April 11 in ACS Nano, Oleg Gang and his colleagues describe a new methodology for fabricating targeted 3D nanoscale structures via self-assembly that can find use in a variety of applications, and they provide a design algorithm for others to follow suit.

Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid metal or plasma causes particles on the inside of the ring to drift inward. Since revolving rings of plasma also occur around stars and black holes, these new findings imply that the wobbles can cause matter in those rings to fall toward the central mass and form planets.

The scientists found that the wobble could grow in a new, unexpected way. Researchers already knew that wobbles could grow from the interaction between plasma and magnetic fields in a gravitational field. But these new results show that wobbles can more easily arise in a region between two jets of fluid with different velocities, an area known as a free shear layer.

Theoretical physicist Jonathan Heckman and Ph.D. student Rebecca Hicks at University of Pennsylvania put a spin on ideas related to testing string theory: Rather than looking to verify it, the team and their collaborators sought a novel way to falsify it with data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “We're not rooting for string theory to fail,” Hicks says. “We're stress-testing it, applying more pressure to see if it holds up." “If string theory survives, fantastic," Heckman says. "If it snaps, we'll learn something profound about nature.”

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have developed an environmentally safer type of plastic that can be used for wearable electronics, sensors and other electrical applications.