Weekly Science Picks
FollowIt’s time to summarise scientific contributions for this week and to open a new chapter for new discoveries. As usual, we would like to present the headlines which marked out the current week. The task was not the simple one, but we made it. Here are the most incredible things from the world of science and technology that happened during this week.
Answering the burning questions
So while many of us were enjoying our summer holidays, our team of fire scientists were hard at work with researchers and volunteers from Victoria’s Country Fire Authority (CFA) to help learn more about grassfire behaviour in Australia.
‘Falcon cam’ reveals how the birds of prey close in for the kill
The strategy exploits an effect called motion camouflage, where the predator does not seem to be moving from the point of view of the prey. Done well, the only clue that the bird is approaching is the gradual increase in its size.
The last place on Earth without human noise
A special kind of noisiness accosts passengers waiting for New York City subways. Down there, sound levels regularly exceed 100 decibels – enough to damage a person’s hearing over time. It was on one such platform that George Foy, a journalist and New York University creative writing professor, suddenly found himself losing it one day, when four trains pulled in at once. “I kind of went momentarily crazy,” he says. He hunched over and stuck his fingers in his ears, desperately trying to block out the cacophony. “I started wondering why the hell I was putting up with this,” he says.
Natural 3-D Counterpart to Graphene Discovered: New Form of Quantum Matter
A 3DTDS is a natural three-dimensional counterpart to graphene with similar or even better electron mobility and velocity,” says Yulin Chen, a physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) when he initiated the study that led to this discovery, and now with the University of Oxford. “Because of its 3D Dirac fermions in the bulk, a 3DTDS also features intriguing non-saturating linear magnetoresistance that can be orders of magnitude higher than the materials now used in hard drives, and it opens the door to more efficient optical sensors.
Please stay thirsty for emerging discoveries. New stories are coming soon!