Single Grains News Today

Single-grain optical dating has been widely used to estimate depositional ages for Quaternary sediments. An understanding of the sources influencing the dispersion of equivalent dose (De) estimates from individual grain measurements is essential for accurate age determination. Beta microdosimetry (i.e., beta dose deposition at the sub-millimetre scale) is a known cause of spread in single-grain De values, so the detection and assessment of beta dose rate (D˙β) variation is important to properl...

In optical dating, especially single-grain dating, various patterns of distributions in equivalent dose (De) are usually observed and analysed using different statistical models. None of these methods, however, is designed to deal with outliers that do not form part of the population of grains associated with the event of interest (the ‘target population’), despite outliers being commonly present in single-grain De distributions. In this paper, we present a Bayesian method for detecting De o...

Some imperfections pay big dividends. A Cornell-led collaboration used X-ray nanoimaging to gain an unprecedented view into solid-state electrolytes, revealing previously undetected crystal defects and dislocations that may now be leveraged to create superior energy storage materials. The group’s paper, “X-ray Nanoimaging of Crystal Defects in Single Grains of Solid-State Electrolyte Li7-3xAlxLa3Zr2O12,” published April 29 in Nano Letters, a publication of the American Chemical Society. T...