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IMAGE: A pulsed laser is focused by a lens onto a point close to the surface of the fruit. The laser-induced plasma creates a shockwave that excites Rayleigh waves on the. view more
Credit: Shibaura Institute of Technology
Most people are probably familiar with the unpleasant feeling of eating overripe or underripe fruit. Those who work in agriculture are tasked with ensuring a timely harvest so that ripeness is at an optimal point when the fruit is sold, both to minimize the amount of fruit that goes to waste and maximize the quality of the final product. To this end, a number of techniques to assess fruit ripeness have been developed, each with their respective advantages and disadvantages depending on the type of produce.
Researchers are developing thin films, the elements for biomolecular electronics. Scientists believe that biological macromolecules such as nucleic acids, proteins, amino acids can become a promising material for modern electronics. It obtains several unique properties, for example, the self-organization ability, which is why the molecules can be assembled into certain structures, for example, into biomolecular films.
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IMAGE: Rice University graduate student Grant Gorman at work in Rice s Ultracold Atoms and Plasmas Lab. view more
Credit: Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
HOUSTON - (March 1, 2021) - Rice University physicists have discovered a way to trap the world s coldest plasma in a magnetic bottle, a technological achievement that could advance research into clean energy, space weather and astrophysics. To understand how the solar wind interacts with the Earth, or to generate clean energy from nuclear fusion, one has to understand how plasma a soup of electrons and ions behaves in a magnetic field, said Rice Dean of Natural Sciences Tom Killian, the corresponding author of a published study about the work in
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. The new work throws wide open the amount of information that can be multiplexed, or simultaneously transmitted, by a coherent light source.
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IMAGE: The illustration visualizes how modulation of electron bunches via laser is used to produce microbunches which emit laserlight. view more
Credit: Tsinghua University
The most modern light sources for research are based on particle accelerators. These are large facilities in which electrons are accelerated to almost the speed of light, and then emit light pulses of a special character. In storage-ring-based synchrotron radiation sources, the electron bunches travel in the ring for billions of revolutions, then generate a rapid succession of very bright light pulses in the deflecting magnets. In contrast, the electron bunches in free-electron lasers (FELs) are accelerated linearly and then emit a single super-bright flash of laser-like light. Storage ring sources as well as FEL sources have facilitated advances in many fields in recent years, from deep insights into biological and medical questions to materials research, technology development, and quantum