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IMAGE: Cross-sectional images (shown in different colors) of a spider web were combined into this 3D image and translated into music. view more
Credit: Isabelle Su and Markus Buehler
WASHINGTON, April 12, 2021 Spiders are master builders, expertly weaving strands of silk into intricate 3D webs that serve as the spider s home and hunting ground. If humans could enter the spider s world, they could learn about web construction, arachnid behavior and more. Today, scientists report that they have translated the structure of a web into music, which could have applications ranging from better 3D printers to cross-species communication and otherworldly musical compositions.
Credit: UNSW Sydney
The search for life on other planets has received a major boost after scientists revealed the spectral signatures of almost 1000 atmospheric molecules that may be involved in the production or consumption of phosphine, a study led by UNSW Sydney revealed.
Scientists have long conjectured that phosphine - a chemical compound made of one phosphorous atom surrounded by three hydrogen atoms (PH3) - may indicate evidence of life if found in the atmospheres of small rocky planets like our own, where it is produced by the biological activity of bacteria.
So when an international team of scientists last year claimed to have detected phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, it raised the tantalising prospect of the first evidence of life on another planet - albeit the primitive, single-celled variety.
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IMAGE: Prof. Karl Leo (right) presents his research to former German President Joachim Gauck (center) and former Saxon Prime Minister Stanislaw Tillich (left). view more
Credit: Bundesregierung/Steffen Kugler
Prof. Karl Leo, director of the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Dresden is a semiconductor physicist at heart. His main interests are novel semiconductor systems such as semiconducting organic thin films, with a special focus on understanding fundamental device principles and their optical response.
He has been fascinated by organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) since seeing his first one in 1991. It was a polymer OLED and it had a lifetime of a few minutes, Leo says. To see how it went from those few minutes to products like today s television screens was a wonderful development.
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IMAGE: A scattering-invariant mode of light is generated by sending a laser beam onto a judiciously configured spatial light modulator (see quadratic pixel array on the left). This modulated beam then. view more
Credit: Allard Mosk/Matthias Kühmayer
Why is sugar not transparent? Because light that penetrates a piece of sugar is scattered, altered and deflected in a highly complicated way. However, as a research team from TU Wien (Vienna) and Utrecht University (Netherlands) has now been able to show, there is a class of very special light waves for which this does not apply: for any specific disordered medium such as the sugar cube you may just have put in your coffee tailor-made light beams can be constructed that are practically not changed by this medium, but only attenuated. The light beam penetrates the medium, and a light pattern arrives on the other side that has the same shape as if the medium were not there at all.
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IMAGE: The author of the work, a researcher at the NUST MISIS Inorganic nanomaterials laboratory Elizaveta Permyakova view more
Credit: Sergey Gnuskov/ NUST MISIS
Young scientists from NUST MISIS have presented multilayer antibacterial coatings with a prolonged effect and a universal spectrum of action. The coating is based on modified titanium oxide and several antiseptic components. The coatings can be used in modern implantology as a protective layer for the prevention of concomitant complications - inflammation or implant rejection. The results of the work have been published in the international scientific journal
Applied Surface Science.
Antibacterial coatings are currently being actively researched, as the search for alternatives to traditional antibiotics is growing. They can be applied to implants, thereby preventing inflammation caused by nosocomial infections.