Science

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Holiday Asteroid Imaged with NASA Radar

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These three radar images of near-Earth asteroid 2003 SD220 were obtained on Dec. 15-17, by coordinating observations with NASA's 230-foot (70-meter) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) 330-foot (100-meter) Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

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E-bandage generates electricity, speeds wound healing in rats

Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an electric field over an injury, dramatically reducing the healing time for skin wounds in rats.

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A wound covered by an electric bandage on a rat's skin (top left) healed faster than a wound under a control bandage (right).

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Mars Express gets festive: A winter wonderland on Mars

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Perspective view of Korolev crater

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Scientists program proteins to pair exactly: Technique paves the way for the creation of protein nanomachines and for the engineering of new cell functions

Proteins have now been designed in the lab to zip together in much the same way that DNA molecules zip up to form a double helix. The technique, whose development was led by University of Washington School of Medicine scientists, could enable the design of protein nanomachines that can potentially help diagnose and treat disease, allow for the more exact engineering of cells and perform a wide variety of other tasks.

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Proteins designed in the lab can now zip together in much the same way that DNA molecules zip up to form a double helix. The technique could enable the design of protein nanomachines that can potentially help diagnose and treat disease, allow for the more exact engineering of cells and perform a wide variety of other tasks. This technique provides scientists a precise, programmable way to control how protein machines interact.

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Lucy Finds Its Place in the Solar System: Navigating NASA’s First Mission to the Trojan Asteroids

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This diagram illustrates Lucy's orbital path. The spacecraft’s path (green) is shown in a frame of reference where Jupiter remains stationary, giving the trajectory its pretzel-like shape. After launch in October 2021, Lucy has two close Earth flybys before encountering its Trojan targets. In the L4 cloud Lucy will fly by (3548) Eurybates (white), (15094) Polymele (pink), (11351) Leucus (red), and (21900) Orus (red) from 2027-2028. After diving past Earth again Lucy will visit the L5 cloud and encounter the (617) Patroclus-Menoetius binary (pink) in 2033. As a bonus, in 2025 on the way to the L4, Lucy flies by a small Main Belt asteroid, (52246) Donaldjohanson (white), named for the discoverer of the Lucy fossil. After flying by the Patroclus-Menoetius binary in 2033, Lucy will continue cycling between the two Trojan clouds every six years.

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Scientists use magnetic defects to achieve electromagnetic wave breakthrough

Surfers spend much of their time watching long waves come onto the shoreline as they attempt to catch one right as it begins to curve and break.

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This shows how a plane electron wave and a magnetic charge interact, forming an electron vortex state that carries orbital angular momentum.

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Mars InSight Lander Seen in First Images from Space

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NASA's InSight spacecraft, its heat shield and its parachute were imaged on Dec. 6 and 11 by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

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The feature size and functional range of molecular electronic devices: Monitoring the transition from tunneling leakage current to molecular tunneling

Advances of miniaturization in electronics have created dramatic impacts on the industrial innovations and our lives. Nowadays, the semiconductor industry has been devoted to scaling down the feature size of electronic devices to the scale of sub-5 nm. Moore's Law, however, has not been the only priority in semiconductor industry because of some inevitable quantum obstacles which hinder the further miniaturization and integration, such as the tunneling leakage current and the thermal dissipation. As a candidate of the supplementary support and even replacement for future electronic device, the bottom-up strategy to use single molecules as charge transport component can be promising, as the primary molecular elements for building single-molecule electronic components in electronic circuitry possess the intrinsic charge transport properties to overcome the tunneling leakage between the same scale of nanogap distance. Nevertheless, knowing the feature size of the domination of tunneling leakage in molecular electronics is of fundamental significance, which enhances the understanding of the technical limitations and boundaries for using single-molecule components as electronic devices.

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The tunneling leakage is a major quantum obstacle which hinders further miniaturization of electronic devices. To explore the miniaturization limits of molecular electronics, the oligo(aryleneethynylene) (OAE) molecules were employed to investigate the transition between through-space tunneling and molecular tunneling. For the shortest OAE molecule, the intrinsic single-molecule charge transport can be outstripped from tunneling leakage at 0.66 nm, suggesting the potential to push the miniaturization limit of molecular electronic devices to the angstrom scale.

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Quantum chemical calculations on quantum computers: A quantum algorithm capable of performing quantum circuits parallelism and full configuration interactions calculations in any open shell molecules without exponential/combinatorial explosion

Quantum computing and quantum information processing technology have attracted attention in recently emerging fields. Among many important and fundamental issues in nowadays science, solving Schroedinger Equation (SE) of atoms and molecules is one of the ultimate goals in chemistry, physics and their related fields. SE is "First Principle" of non-relativistic quantum mechanics, whose solutions termed wave-functions can afford any information of electrons within atoms and molecules, predicting their physicochemical properties and chemical reactions. Researchers from Osaka City University (OCU) in Japan, Dr. K. Sugisaki, Profs. K. Sato and T. Takui and coworkers have found a quantum algorithm enabling us to perform full configuration interaction (Full-CI) calculations for any open shell molecules without exponential/combinatorial explosion. Full-CI gives the exact numerical solutions of SE, which are one of the intractable problems with any supercomputers. The implementation of such a quantum algorithm contributes to the acceleration of implementing practical quantum computers.

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(a) (left) Previously proposed quantum circuit. (b) (right) New parallelized quantum circuit. In (b), the complexity of the circuit is reduced drastically.

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Harnessing the power of 'spin orbit' coupling in silicon: Scaling up quantum computation

Australian scientists have investigated new directions to scale up qubits - utilising the spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits - adding a new suite of tools to the armory.

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This is an artists impression of spin-orbit coupling of atom qubits.

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