Scientists Produce Rare Diamonds In Minutes At Room Temperature

Iwastheone writes: While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they…

Clues to Mars life in Earth’s Atacama Desert

Researchers in the U.S. and Spain have discovered a plethora of previously unknown microbes living in wet clay layers below Chile’s arid Atacama Desert. The finding will help future rovers search for life on Mars. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/microbes-clay-atacama-desert-life-on-mars…

Quantum light squeezes the noise out of microscopy signals

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used quantum optics to advance state-of-the-art microscopy and illuminate a path to detecting material properties with greater sensitivity than is possible with traditional tools. …

Tiny bubbles make a quantum leap

July 13, 2020—Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Montana State University report today that they have found that placing sufficient strain in a 2-D material—tungsten diselenide (WSe2)—creates localized states that can yield single-photon emitters. Using sophisticated optical microscopy techniques developed at Columbia over the past three years, the team was able to directly image these states for the first time, revealing that…

Incredible close-up images of the natural world recognised with awards

Ethereal photos of life’s building blocks, Earth’s toughest creature and a close-up of a gem win Olympus Global Image of the Year Life Science Light Microscopy Award regional prizes Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24532760-300-incredible-close-up-images-of-the-natural-world-recognised-with-awards/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…

Scientists Find the First-Ever Animal That Doesn’t Need Oxygen To Survive

Scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel discovered that a salmon parasite called Henneguya salminicola doesn’t have a mitochondrial genome — the first multicellular organism known to have this absence. That means it doesn’t breathe; in fact, it lives its life completely free of oxygen dependency. ScienceAlert reports: It’s a cnidarian, belonging to the same phylum as corals, jellyfish and anemones….

Ultrafast Camera Takes 1 Trillion Frames Per Second of Transparent Objects, Phenomena

After developing the world’s fastest camera a little over a year ago, Caltech’s Lihong Wang decided that wasn’t good enough and started working on an even faster device. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances details a new camera from Wang that can take up to 1 trillion pictures per second of transparent objects. Phys.Org reports: The camera technology,…

Researcher Uses Focused Gallium Ions To Build A Microscopic Gingerbread House

“Travis Casagrande, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at Hamilton’s McMaster University has created the smallest gingerbread house ever built,” writes long-time Slashdot reader Mr.Fork, “even smaller than the one made in France last year by nanorobotics researchers at the Femto-ST Institute in BesanÃon.” “Decking the halls is a whole lot harder when you’re decorating something 10…