Scientists gain new insights into novel quantum phenomena
Bilayer system. Credit: Marcell Gall, Nicola Wurz et al./ Nature.
They are as thin as a hair, only a hundred thousand times thinner–so-called two-dimensional materials, consisting of a single layer of atoms, have been booming in research for years.
They became known to a wider audience when two Russian-British scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for the discovery of graphene, a building block of graphite.
The special feature of such materials is that they possess novel properties that can only be explained with the help of the laws of quantum mechanics and that may be relevant for enhanced technologies.
Early mammal with remarkably precise bite
Paleontologists at the University of Bonn (Germany) have succeeded in reconstructing the chewing motion of an early mammal that lived almost 150 million years ago. This showed that its teeth worked extremely precisely and surprisingly efficiently. Yet it is possible that this very aspect turned out to be a disadvantage in the course of evolution. The study is published in the journal
Scientific Reports .
At just twenty centimeters long, the least weasel is considered the world s smallest carnivore alive today. The mammal that researchers at the University of Bonn have now studied is unlikely to have been any bigger. However, the species to which it belongs has long been extinct: Priacodon fruitaensis (the scientific name) lived almost 150 million years ago, at a time when dinosaurs dominated the animal world and the triumph of mammals was still to come.
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