Science | WPN World People News

Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s atmosphere rings its silhouette like a luminous halo in this image taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft around midnight EDT on July 15. This global portrait of the atmosphere was captured when the spacecraft was about 1.25 million miles (2 million kilometers) from Pluto and shows structures as small as 12 miles across. The image, delivered to Earth on July 23, is displayed with north at the top of the frame.

By encoding information in photons via their spin, photonic computers could be orders of magnitude faster and efficient than their current-day counterparts. Likewise, encoding information in the spin of electrons, rather than just their quantity, could make spintronic computers with similar advantages. University of Pennsylvania engineers and physicists have now discovered a property of silicon that combines aspects of all of these desirable qualities. In their experimental set-up, pictured here, they a silicon-based photonic device that is sensitive to the spin of the photons in a laser shined on one of its electrodes. Light that is polarized clockwise causes current to flow in one direction, while counter-clockwise polarized light makes it flow in the other direction.

Artist’s impression of Gaia14aae.

Array of nanowires gallium phosphide made with an electron microscope.

In the center left of Pluto’s vast heart-shaped feature – informally named “Tombaugh Regio” - lies a vast, craterless plain that appears to be no more than 100 million years old, and is possibly still being shaped by geologic processes. This frozen region is north of Pluto’s icy mountains and has been informally named Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), after Earth’s first artificial satellite. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly-shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. This image was acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as one-half mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. The blocky appearance of some features is due to compression of the image.

This annotated view of a portion of Pluto’s Sputnik Planum (Sputnik Plain), named for Earth’s first artificial satellite, shows an array of enigmatic features. The surface appears to be divided into irregularly shaped segments that are ringed by narrow troughs, some of which contain darker materials. Features that appear to be groups of mounds and fields of small pits are also visible. This image was acquired by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on July 14 from a distance of 48,000 miles (77,000 kilometers). Features as small as a half-mile (1 kilometer) across are visible. The blocky appearance of some features is due to compression of the image.

False color atomic force microscopy image of a silicon nanowire with the four contacts used in the spin measurements. The ferromagnetic metal/graphene tunnel barrier contacts used to inject and detect spin appear as blue, the gold ohmic reference contacts appear as yellow, and the green line is the silicon nanowire transport channel. The bright dot on the end of the nanowire is the gold nanoparticle used to seed the nanowire growth.

This is the microscopic image of the novel 3D photocatalytic material, designed by scientists from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, and the Fuzhou University, China.

Interaction of the terahertz field with graphene leads to efficient electron heating, which in turn strongly changes graphene conductivity.

A team of chemists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison has introduced a new fuel cell catalyst approach that uses a molecular catalyst system instead of solid catalysts.