Pangolins inspire medical robots

Jun 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Pangolins are fascinating creatures. This animal looks like a walking pine cone, as it is the only mammal completely covered with hard scales. The scales are made of keratin, just like our hair and nails. The scales overlap and are directly connected to the underlying...

Open-source software to speed up quantum research

Jun 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Within a few decades, quantum technology is expected to become a key technology in areas such as health, communication, defence and energy. The power and potential of the technology lie in the odd and very special properties of quantum particles. Of particular interest to researchers...

Observations of high-mass star seeds defy models

Jun 20, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Astronomers have mapped 39 interstellar clouds where high-mass stars are expected to form. This large data set shows that the accepted model of low-mass star formation needs to be expanded to explain the formation of high-mass stars. This suggests the formation of high-mass stars is...

New research on self-locking light sources presents opportunities for quantum technologies

Jun 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) In a paper published in Nature Communications ("Asynchronous locking in metamaterials of fluids of light and sound"), researchers from the Paul Drude Institute in Berlin, Germany, and the Instituto Balseiro, Bariloche, Argentina, demonstrated that light emitters with different resonance frequencies can asynchronously self-lock their relative...

Making the blue shine brighter and longer

Jun 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Organic light-emitting diodes are used in smart phones, tablets, and large TV screens. As they do not need any additional background illumination, they are energy-efficient. The can be produced at low costs by thin-film technology and also work on flexible carrier materials, thus enabling bendable...

photon pairs compress an electron beam into short pulses

Jun 19, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Physicists at the University of Konstanz generate one of the shortest signals ever produced by humans: Using paired laser pulses, they succeeded in compressing a series of electron pulses to a numerically analyzed duration of only 0.000000000000000005 seconds. Processes in nature that occur in molecules...