Textile clinic: stretchable fabrics tailored with carbon nanotube electrodes monitor the heart

01 Oct 2021 Raudel Avila

Smart shirt: Rice University graduate student Lauren Taylor shows a shirt containing carbon nanotube thread that provides constant monitoring of the wearer’s heart. (Courtesy: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University)

Museum collections across the world feature characteristic clothes from different time periods that showcase human history. Such garments can identify a wearer’s country, social status, approximate age and religion. Clothing also provides a historical link to the materials and textile technologies available at the time. Today, researchers envision that clothes’ functionalities could reach beyond fashion, protection and comfort to provide sophisticated biosensing and tracking capabilities.

 

Helgoland and the captivating origins of quantum theory

15 Jun 2021 James Dacey

In June 1925 Werner Heisenberg retreated to Helgoland in the North Sea, a treeless island offering the 23-year-old German physicist a space to think, along with some respite from the extreme hay fever he was suffering. On that remote outpost, Heisenberg had an idea that would revolutionize physics and bring profound implications for philosophy and technology. This was an event that would kickstart quantum mechanics.Carlo Rovelli. (Courtesy: Christopher Wahl)

Helgoland is the title of the latest book by physicist and science writer Carlo Rovelli. It is essentially a journey through the origins of quantum physics, interwoven with narrative about Heisenberg, Dirac, Einstein and the other luminaries from the first quantum generation. Rovelli also discusses his own interpretations of the quantum world, and connects quantum theory with diverse ideas, from Buddhist thinking to the grand themes of the Russian revolution.

 

Tackling the big questions in physics with Jim Al-Khalili, how a physicist worked out why dinosaurs went extinct

30 Sep 2021 Hamish Johnston

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I chat with the physicist, author and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili about his new television documentary Jim Al-Khalili’s Guide to Life, The Universe and Everything, his fascination with the quantum world and his long running BBC radio series The Life Scientific.

Muons are elementary particles that have proven to be very useful for studying the properties of materials, as Peter Baker of the UK’s ISIS Neutron and Muon Source explains.

 

Life beyond the Nobel: Russell Hulse’s path from binary pulsar discoverer to plasma physicist

02 Oct 2021 Margaret Harris

In the run-up to the announcement of the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics on 5 October, we’re running a series of blog posts looking at previous recipients and what they did after their Nobel prize-winning work. Margaret Harris examines the circumstances that shaped the career of 1993 laureate Russell Hulse

Two-body problem Artist's impression of a binary pulsar. (Courtesy: Australia Telescope National Facility / CSIRO / John Rowe Animations)

In the summer of 1974, Russell Hulse was down in the weeds of collecting data for his PhD thesis when he noticed something odd. Together with his supervisor Joseph Taylor, Hulse was using the famed 350 m spherical reflector dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico to search for pulsars: compact and highly magnetized stars that broadcast bursts of radio waves across the galaxy as they rotate. Although the first pulsar had been spotted only six years earlier by another student-and-supervisor pair, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish, these unusual stars were already a hot topic in astrophysics.

 

Inflatable liquid crystalline elastomers create complex colour-changing displays

27 Sep 2021

Pixelated colouration: A seven-segment display is created by manipulating multiple air channels to activate liquid crystalline elastomer-based pixels. (Courtesy: Nat. Mater. 10.1038/s41563-021-01075-3)

Elastomers that undergo large spectral shifts in colour when stretched very little have been developed by researchers in the US and South Korea. The material scientists say that these liquid crystalline elastomers with an unusually large Poisson’s ratio could have a variety of uses, from visual displays to smart windows.

 

‘Most perfect graphene ever’ grows fold-free on metal foil

29 Sep 2021 Isabelle Dumé

(a, b) SEM images and (c) AFM phase image of graphene folds in an adlayer-free single-crystal graphene film on a Cu(111) foil. (d) Schematic of the mechanism of graphene folds formation during the cooling process. (Courtesy: Institute for Basic Science)

A team of researchers in Korea claims to have synthesized the most perfect large-area single-crystal graphene film ever by pinning down the temperature above which unwanted folds naturally develop in the carbon sheet. The new fold-free film will likely be used to make high-performance electronic and photonic devices.

Pure samples of graphene (a sheet of carbon just one atom thick) are usually grown using chemical vapour deposition (CVD).

 

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy could slow, or even reverse, Alzheimer’s disease pathology

30 Sep 2021 Tami Freeman

Two-photon microscopy: Amyloid plaques in the somatosensory cortex of treated (right panels) and control (left panels) mice, before (top row) and after (bottom row) HBOT; scale bar: 50 μm. (Courtesy: CC BY 3.0/Aging 10.18632/aging.203485)

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), an established medical treatment that involves breathing pure oxygen in a pressurized environment, could provide a new means to slow the progression, or even prevent the development, of Alzheimer’s disease. That’s the conclusion of a new study from researchers at Tel Aviv University and Shamir Medical Center.