Article archives

How a shifting photonic crystal creates a robust laser

How a shifting photonic crystal creates a robust laser

Condensed matterDIPC Advanced materialsMaterials

By DIPC

New research numerically demonstrates how carefully structured materials can control light in ways that are both precise and robust. It brings together ideas from photonics and topology to show how a laser can emerge from the boundary between two distinct optical regimes. The physical system considered in the study is a bilayer photonic crystal. A […]

What we actually see – and don’t see – tells us a lot about consciousness

What we actually see – and don’t see – tells us a lot about consciousness

NeurosciencePhilosophy of science

By Invited Researcher

Author: Henry Taylor, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham What can you see right now? This might seem like a silly question, but what enters your consciousness is not the whole story when it comes to vision. A great deal of visual processing in the brain goes on well below our conscious awareness […]

100-meter underground wireless communication

100-meter underground wireless communication

Technology

By Mapping Ignorance

Korean researchers have confirmed that underground wireless communication is possible, moving beyond the terrestrial wireless communication they have primarily focused on until now. This opened up a new wireless channel for confirming the survival of buried people in the event of a collapse of an underground facility such as a mine, conducting underground rescue operations […]

Chiral altermagnets and the unexpected origins of spin currents

Chiral altermagnets and the unexpected origins of spin currents

Condensed matterDIPC Advanced materialsMaterialsQuantum physics

By DIPC

Every time a computer processes information, electrons shuttle through circuits carrying electric charge, and much of the energy they carry is wasted as heat. Spintronics proposes a different approach: instead of relying solely on the charge of electrons, exploit another of their properties called spin, a quantum-mechanical quantity that can be thought of as a […]

Microbes in Antarctica survive the freezing and dark winter by living on air

Microbes in Antarctica survive the freezing and dark winter by living on air

Microbiology

By César Tomé

Author: Ry Holland, Research Fellow in Microbial Ecology, Monash University Winter in Antarctica is long and dark. Temperatures remain well below freezing. In many places, the Sun sets in April and does not rise above the horizon again until August. Without sunlight, photosynthetic life such as plants, mosses and algae cannot make energy. But that’s […]

Modeling the brain’s solution to the cocktail party problem

Modeling the brain’s solution to the cocktail party problem

Neuroscience

By Mapping Ignorance

MIT neuroscientists have figured out how the brain is able to focus on a single voice among a cacophony of many voices, shedding light on a longstanding neuroscientific phenomenon known as the “cocktail party problem.” This attentional focus becomes necessary when you’re in any crowded environment, such as a cocktail party, with many conversations going […]

How strain shapes the quantum properties of twisted graphene

How strain shapes the quantum properties of twisted graphene

Condensed matterDIPC Electronic PropertiesMaterialsQuantum physics

By DIPC

Imagine taking two identical sheets of chicken wire and laying them on top of one another. If you align them perfectly, they look like a single sheet. But if you rotate the top layer by just a tiny amount, a beautiful large-scale crawling pattern emerges. In physics, we call this a Moiré pattern. When we […]

Why we shouldn’t abandon handwriting at school

Why we shouldn’t abandon handwriting at school

LanguageLinguisticsNeurolinguistics

By Invited Researcher

Author: Atheena Johnson, Docteure en linguistique appliquée, Université Paris Nanterre Over the decades, technological devices have been gradually integrated into language learning, as is recently the case with generative artificial intelligence (AI). Does the sophistication of these tools eventually render pencils and pens obsolete? Or can digital uses be combined with handwriting? How does writing […]