Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have invented a coating that could dramatically reduce friction in common load-bearing systems with moving parts, from vehicle drive trains to wind and hydroelectric turbines. It reduces the friction of steel rubbing on steel at...
Scientists analyze a single atom with X-rays for the first time
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) In the most powerful X-ray facilities in the world, scientists can analyze samples so small they contain only 10,000 atoms. Smaller sizes have proved exceedingly difficult to achieve, but a multi-institutional team has scaled down to a single atom. “X-ray beams are used everywhere, including...
ChatGPT co-designs its first robot
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Poems, essays and even books – is there anything the open AI platform ChatGPT can’t handle? These new AI developments have inspired researchers at TU Delft and the Swiss technical university EPFL to dig a little deeper: For instance, can ChatGPT also design a robot?...
Researchers discover chemical evidence for pair-instability supernova from a very massive first star
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) The first stars illuminated the Universe during the Cosmic Dawn and put an end to the cosmic "dark ages" that followed the Big Bang. However, the distribution of their mass is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the cosmos. Numerical simulations of the formation...
Sponge makes robotic device a soft touch
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A simple sponge has improved how robots grasp, scientists from the University of Bristol have found. This easy-to-make sponge-jamming device can help stiff robots handle delicate items carefully by mimicking the nuanced touch, or variable stiffness, of a human. Robots can skip, jump and...
Novel approach offers cheap, reliable positioning systems for robots
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) QUT researchers have developed a unique and improved approach to the way robots see, with the aim of making cheap and reliable positioning systems for applications such as service robots and general autonomous vehicle systems. The research has not yet been peer reviewed but was...
Researchers find classical novae are anything but simple
Jun 07, 2023 (Nanowerk News) While studying classical novae using the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a graduate researcher uncovered evidence the objects may have been erroneously typecast as simple. The new observations, which detected non-thermal emission from a classical nova with a dwarf companion, were...
Illuminating the molecular ballet in living cells
Jun 06, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Researchers at Kyoto University, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), and Photron Limited in Japan have developed the world’s fastest camera capable of detecting fluorescence from single molecules. They describe the technology and examples of its power in two articles published in...
Swarming microrobots self-organize into diverse patterns
Jun 06, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A research collaboration between Cornell and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has found an efficient way to expand the collective behavior of swarming microrobots: Mixing different sizes of the micron-scale ‘bots enables them to self-organize into diverse patterns that can be manipulated when...
New anti-counterfeiting system relies on completely new approach to non-copyable nanopatterns
Jun 06, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) has developed a method that could make it more difficult to counterfeit products in the future. The new and patented method makes it possible to produce unique, non-copyable fluorescent patterns quickly,...