A roasted and ground coffee matrix is a highly complex porous medium characterized by multiscale features. A typical coffee matrix used for double-shot espresso brew is about 15 ml in volume and consists of millions of coffee particles. These coffee particles are produced by grinding roasted coffee beans, and have an approximately bimodal size distribution […]
Ashes have always been a powerful and evocative metaphor representing a vanished and irretrievable past. However, we live in prodigious times, in which nothing can be taken for granted anymore, and the feat of reading the contents of some of the charred papyri of Herculaneum is a good example of this. The credit goes to […]
Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar sensors that often act as these vehicles’ “eyes” have difficulty detecting dark-coloured objects. New research describes a highly reflective black paint […]
The rise of commercially viable generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform a vast range of sectors. This transformation will be particularly profound in contemporary military education. Generative AI will fundamentally reshape war gaming — analytical games that simulate aspects of warfare at tactical, operational or strategic levels — by allowing senior military […]
A new imaging technique can give scientists a much closer look at fibril assemblies, stacks of peptides like amyloid beta, most notably associated with Alzheimer’s disease. These cross-β fibril assemblies are also useful building blocks within designer biomaterials for medical applications, but their resemblance to their amyloid beta cousins, whose tangles are a symptom of […]
A team of researchers has invented a more efficient way to extract lithium from waste liquids leached from mining sites, oil fields and used batteries. They demonstrated that a common mineral can adsorb at least five times more lithium than can be collected using previously developed adsorbent materials. The new low-cost high-lithium-uptake process presents the […]
Condensed matter • Nanotechnology • Particle physics • Physics
Superconductors can carry large electrical currents without any resistance. One situation where they don’t carry currents without resistance is when there is too much current. By designing microscopic electronic components made from very thin superconductors, researchers can use this effect to create a switch, like a transistor. Nanowire superconducting switching devices (called nanocryotrons, or nTrons […]
Computer science • Energy • Mathematics • Mechanical Engineering
Floating offshore wind (FOW) is one of the most rapidly growing forms of green power. As of 2021 though, there were only 113 MW in operation in Europe, although this figure is predicted to triple by the end of 2024, and escalate up to 10 GW by 2030 and 150 GW by 2050. The current […]
Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) is a type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) fabrication process that uses complementary and symmetrical pairs of p-type and n-type MOSFETs for logic functions. CMOS technology is used for constructing integrated circuit chips, including microprocessors, microcontrollers, memory chips, and other digital logic circuits. After 50 years of continuous transistor size downscaling and […]
Twisted bilayer and multilayer systems represent two-dimensional materials, where atom-thick layers of the same or different materials are superimposed and rotated by an arbitrary twist angle. Twisted bilayer graphene (TBG) represents arguably the most prominent physical system of this kind, the bilayers of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) the other. The effect of twisting two periodic […]