Lifeboat Foundation

I remember the time when states of matter were pretty simple: Solid, liquid and gas. Then came plasma state, supercritical fluid, Bose –Einstein condensate and more. Now this list of states of matter has grown by one more, with the surprising discovery of a new state dubbed “dropletons” that shows some similarity to liquids but occur under very unlike circumstances.

The discovery of new state of matter occurred when a team of scientists at the University of Colorado Joint Institute for Lab Astrophysics were concentrating laser light on gallium arsenide (GaAs) to generate excitons.

Excitons are made when a photon strikes a material, mostly a semiconductor. If an electron is knocked loose, or excited, it leaves what is labelled as “electron hole” behind. If the forces of other charges at very close distance keep the electron close enough to the hole in order to feel an attraction, a certain state forms called as an Exciton. Excitons are also called quasiparticles because the holes and electrons act together as if they were like a single particle.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=uK9ijZeHWjI

You’ve probably seen a few attempts at recreating worlds in game engines, but never at this level of detail. Artist Jason B is working on the Enterprise-D Construction Project, an Unreal Engine-based virtual tour that aims to reproduce all 42 decks in the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation. While it’s not quite photorealistic, the attention to detail in this digital starship is already uncanny — the bridge, shuttle bay and other areas feel like lived-in spaces, just waiting for the crew to return. Jason is drawing on as much official material as he can to get things pixel-perfect, and he’s only taking creative liberties in those areas where there’s no canonical content.

The project is currently just a hobby, but there might be more in the cards if everything goes smoothly. Jason is considering populating the ship, offering a chance to explore the outsides of other locations (such as Deep Space Nine) and even introducing game mechanics. Whether or not those happen will depend on many things falling into place, however. The creator is thinking about crowdfunding campaigns to help with his work, and there’s the looming question of licensing: he’ll likely need CBS’ approval to release anything, especially if he wants to charge for it. Even if it amounts to little more than some screenshots and video, though, it’s an impressive feat.

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Australian scientists have published an ‘instruction manual’ that makes it a whole lot easier and cheaper to create metallic glass — a type of flexible but ultra-tough alloy that’s been described as “the most significant materials science innovation since plastic”. The material is similar to the sci-fi liquid-type metal used to create the T-1000 in Terminator 2 - when it’s heated it’s as malleable as chewing gum, but when it cools it’s three times stronger than steel.

Researchers have been dabbling with the creation of metallic glass — or amorphous metal — for decades, and have made a range of different types by mixing metals such as magnesium, palladium, or copper — but only after an expensive and lengthy process of trial and error. Now, for the first time, Australian scientists have created a model of the atomic structure of metallic glass, and it will allow scientists to quickly and easily predict which metal combinations can form the unique material.

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Imagine a “smart pill” that can sense problems in your intestines and actively release the appropriate drugs. We have the biological understanding to create such a device, but we’re still searching for electronic materials (like batteries and circuits) that pose no risk if they get stuck in our bodies. In Trends in Biotechnology on September 21, Christopher Bettinger of Carnegie Mellon University presents a vision for creating safe, consumable electronics, such as those powered by the charged ions within our digestive tracts.

Edible electronic medical devices are not a new idea. Since the 1970s, researchers have been asking people to swallow prototypes that measure temperature and other biomarkers. Currently, there are ingestible cameras for gastrointestinal surgeries as well as sensors attached to medications used to study how drugs are broken down in the body.

“The primary risk is the intrinsic toxicity of these materials, for example, if the battery gets mechanically lodged in the gastrointestinal tract–but that’s a known risk. In fact, there is very little unknown risk in these kinds of devices,” says Bettinger, a professor in materials science and engineering. “The breakfast you ate this morning is only in your GI tract for about 20 hours–all you need is a battery that can do its job for 20 hours and then, if anything happens, it can just degrade away.”

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DNA has garnered attention for its potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams.

For the last 20 years, scientists have tried to design large DNA crystals with precisely prescribed depth and complex features – a design quest just fulfilled by a team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The team built 32 DNA crystals with precisely-defined depth and an assortment of sophisticated three-dimensional (3D) features, an advance reported in Nature Chemistry.

The team used their “DNA-brick self-assembly” method, which was first unveiled in a 2012 Science publication when they created more than 100 3D complex nanostructures about the size of viruses. The newly-achieved periodic crystal structures are more than 1000 times larger than those discrete DNA brick structures, sizing up closer to a speck of dust, which is actually quite large in the world of DNA nanotechnology.

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The U.S. military doesn’t just build big, scary tanks and giant warplanes; it’s also interested in teeny, tiny stuff. The Pentagon’s latest research project aims to improve today’s technologies by shrinking them down to microscopic size.

The recently launched Atoms to Product (A2P) program aims to develop atom-size materials to build state-of-the-art military and consumer products. These tiny manufacturing methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than those currently being used to build new technologies, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The tiny, high-tech materials of the future could be used to build things like hummingbird-size drones and super-accurate (and super-small) atomic clocks — two projects already spearheaded by DARPA. [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects].

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A team of scientists from Lund University in Sweden has figured out how to turn a single molecule into a microphone by making it capable of detecting the vibrations produced by sound waves.

This minuscule microphone works by embedding a single molecule of a substance called dibenzoterrylene (DBT) in a tiny crystal of a hydrocarbon material called anthracene. When the crystal is exposed to sound waves, the DBT molecule is disturbed by the vibrations, and it vibrates in response.

“This movement changes the interaction between the electron clouds of DBT and anthracene, which ultimately result in a slight shift in DBT’s fluorescence,” explains Sarah Zhang at Gizmodo. “By tracking the fluorescence of just a single molecule of DBT, the scientists could track the frequency of the sound.”

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Nanotechnology promises significant advances in electronics, materials, biotechnology, alternative energy sources, and much more.

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It’s just one atom thick, but carbyne has twice the strength of its two-dimensional cousin, graphene, and three times the stiffness of a diamond. And researchers have just discovered that it can act like a transistor for new tinier electronics.

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