NEWS RELEASES

Researchers have developed a new method for 3D printing objects with very different properties, including levels of hardness and transparency, on a pixel-by-pixel basis while using commonly available materials and inexpensive 3D printers. The method could lend itself to the creation of realistic models of body parts for medical students to practice surgery on or new types of personal protective gear.

A new UC San Diego study reveals that fossil fuel-based plastic pollution may be promoting toxic water conditions by removing animals that keep water at safe levels. Biologically based plastics had a much smaller impact, the study found.

Writing in Nature, a team led by physicists Cory Dean from Columbia University and Jia Li from the University of Texas at Austin has observed a superfluid, which normally remains in constant motion, come to a standstill. “For the first time, we’ve seen a superfluid undergo a phase transition to become what appears to be a supersolid,” said Dean. It’s like water freezing to ice, but at the quantum level.

After maritime shipping emissions were sharply reduced following a mandated switch in fuels, University of Utah atmospheric scientists sprang into action to see how the change would affect cloud formation over North Atlantic. Review of satellite observations and weather data determined few droplets formed, yet the clouds’ ability to reflect sunlight remained surprisingly stable.

Important everyday products—from plastics to detergents—are made through chemical reactions that mostly use precious metals such as platinum as catalysts. Newly identified methods to harness the properties of tungsten carbide could yield viable substitutes for platinum.

Researchers have reported new experimental results addressing the origin of rare proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron, called p-nuclei. Led by Artemis Tsantiri, then-graduate student at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and current postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina in Canada, the study presents the first rare isotope beam measurement of proton capture on arsenic-73 to produce selenium-74, providing new constraints on how the lightest p-nucleus is formed and destroyed in the cosmos. The team published its results in Physical Review Letters (“Constraining the Synthesis of the Lightest 𝑝 Nucleus ⁷⁴Se”).