Science | WPN World People News

The solar steam device developed at Rice University has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent, far surpassing that of photovoltaic solar panels. It may first be used in sanitation and water-purification applications in the developing world.

When the new shear thinning hydrogel (top) is heated to body temperature, polymer chains join together to form a reinforcing network that improves the gel’s stability (bottom).

Artist's concept of Kepler in the distant solar system. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

A schematic picture of the defect-engineered spin amplifier demonstrated in this work. The wave pattern symbolizes the time variation of the spin signal, namely the difference between the numbers of spin-up and spin-down electrons. The red and blue arrows represent the period with more spin-up and spin-down electrons, respectively. The amplitude of the wave reflects the strength of the spin signal, which is weak before entering the spin amplifier but becomes stronger when exiting. The defects that have enabled the spin-amplification functionality of a non-magnetic semiconductor are indicated by the yellow balls, each with a spin-polarized localized electron (indicated by the red and blue arrows). The spin direction of this localized electron rapidly follows the sign of the input spin signal, which serves to only attract and remove the incoming electrons with an undesired spin orientation. This leads to a significant enhancement in the spin polarization of the electrons passing the spin amplifier, giving rise to a strongly amplified output spin signal that has truthfully cloned the exactly same time-varying function and thus the spin-encoded information of the input spin signal.

By combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and one of nature’s zoom lenses, astronomers have found what is probably the most distant galaxy yet seen in the Universe. The object offers a peek back into a time when the Universe was only 3 percent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.

An illustration shows the design of Rice University researchers' antenna-on-a-chip for spatial light modulation. The chip is able to process incident infrared light for signal processing at very high speeds.

Diamond nano-tip integrated onto the micro-heater of a doped silicon microcantilever. The tip has a radius of 10 nm.