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From early in his career, Kamal Kesour understood the damaging effects of urban noise and was aware of the instrumentation used to measure and control it. He had lived in big cities, and after his PhD he went to work for an environmental consulting firm that specialized in urban noise. But it wasn’t until later, during a research position at Innovation Maritime in Canada, that he realized marine mammals can experience similarly noisy environments. This noise comes from underwater vibrations generated by shipping vessels transporting goods around the world. Kesour now has a career helping to make maritime transportation vessels less noisy.

Kesour has spent the past few years in Rimouski, Canada, at the Marine Acoustic Research Station (MARS), which lies on the banks of the St. Lawrence Estuary and is jointly led by Innovation Maritime, the Rimouski Institute of Marine Sciences, and engineering consultancy OpDAQ systems. There, he measures ambient underwater noise from ships as they pass on their way to and from the Atlantic Ocean or North America’s Great Lakes. He also conducts on-ship measurements to help pinpoint noise sources and to “fingerprint” the vibrations of individual ships. Physics Magazine caught up with Kesour to learn more about his measurements and their implications for noise pollution produced by the shipping industry.

All interviews are edited for brevity and clarity.

BWC Megastructures are types of hypothetical mega engineering projects, like artificial planets, who scope is vast, but whose practicality is debatable. To fi…

Photon-mediated entanglement in atomic ensembles coupled to cavities enables the engineering of quantum states with a graph-like entanglement structure. This offers potential advantages in quantum computation and metrology.

A new advance by Stanford engineers could lead to particle accelerators being widely available in science, medicine, and industry.

Stanford researchers are getting closer to building a tiny electron accelerator based on “accelerator-on-a-chip” technology with broad potential applications in studying physics as well as medical and industrial uses.

The researchers have demonstrated that a silicon dielectric laser accelerator, or DLA, can now both speed up and confine electrons, creating a focused beam of high-energy electrons. “If the electrons were microscopic cars, it’s as if, for the first time, we’re steering and we have our foot on the gas,” said Payton Broaddus, PhD ’23 in electrical engineering and the lead author on a paper published on February 23 detailing the breakthrough in Physical Review Letters.

Fuzziness may rule the quantum realm, but it can be manipulated to our advantage.

Nanoparticles (NPs) administered in the human body will undergo rapid surface modification upon contact with biological fluids driven by their interfacial interaction with a diverse range of biomolecules. Such spontaneous self-assembly and adsorption of proteins and other biomolecules onto the NP surface constitute what is commonly known as the protein or biomolecule corona. This surface biotransformation of the NPs modulates their biological interactions and impact on physiological systems and can influence their overall pharmacological profile. Here, we comment on how the initially considered ‘nuisance’ of the in vivo corona formation can now be considered a nanoparticle engineering tool for biomedical use, such as in endogenous tissue targeting, personalized biomarker discovery and immunomodulation.

Perovskites, a broad class of compounds with a particular kind of crystal structure, have long been seen as a promising alternative or supplement to today’s silicon or cadmium telluride solar panels. They could be far more lightweight and inexpensive, and could be coated onto virtually any substrate, including paper or flexible plastic that could be rolled up for easy transport.

In their efficiency at converting sunlight to electricity, perovskites are becoming comparable to silicon, whose manufacture still requires long, complex, and energy-intensive processes. One big remaining drawback is longevity: They tend to break down in a matter of months to years, while silicon solar panels can last more than two decades. And their efficiency over large module areas still lags behind silicon.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions has revealed ways to optimize efficiency and better control degradation, by engineering the nanoscale structure of perovskite devices.

Vanderbilt researchers have developed a new nanoparticle that can more get drugs inside cells to boost the immune system and fight diseases such as cancer.

The research is led by John Wilson, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and biomedical engineering, as well as a corresponding author on the paper about the research that was recently published in the journal Nanoscale.

Wilson, who is Principal Investigator of the Immunoengineering Lab at Vanderbilt and a Chancellor Faculty Fellow, and his team created a polymeric nanoparticle that can penetrate cell membranes and get drugs into the cytosol—or liquid—inside cells.

A new technique for electrospinning sponges has allowed scientists from the University of Surrey to directly produce 3D scaffolds—on which skin grafts could be grown from the patient’s own skin.

Electrospinning is a technique that electrifies droplets of liquid to form fibers from plastics. Previously, scientists had only been able to make 2D films. This is the first time anybody has electro-spun a 3D structure directly and on-demand so that it can be produced to scale. The research is published in the journal Nanomaterials.

Chloe Howard, from Surrey’s School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, said, After spinning these scaffolds, we grew skin cells on them. Seven days later, they were twice as viable as cells grown on 2D films or mats. They even did better than cells grown on plasma-treated polystyrene—previously, the gold standard. They were very happy cells on our 3D scaffolds.