Lying beyond Pluto, 2026 ED138 could be as large as 1,500 kilometers in diameter. Astronomers are still working to confirm whether it meets the criteria for a dwarf planet.
Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.
The general idea behind a quantum battery is that these somehow use a quantum effect to store and release energy faster than would be possible using classical physics. First proposed in 2013, the initial Dicke model saw its theoretical quantum advantage shot down by 2020, leading to the search for alternative models.
We have previously seen claims of a quantum advantage in batteries based on the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, such as by [Davide Rossini] et al., but this new paper may be the first prototype cell demonstrating a reproducible effect.
In the here demonstrated cell a microcavity is created with strong light-matter coupling, allowing for both energy storage and discharging, with the illuminated particles super-absorbing the light with what the researchers claim to be due to these particles cooperating using a quantum mechanism. Effectively scaling up the cell would thus scale up the charge- and discharge rate faster than in a conventional chemical cell.
Whether this demonstration can be replicated and expanded upon remains to be seen, naturally. The stored energy in this experiment was very small and the storage time only very brief, so for now it serves primarily as an interesting experimental result for researchers to dig through.
United Launch Alliance announced Wednesday it plans to return its Vulcan rocket to service on November 13, nine months after a solid rocket booster anomaly threw the company's 2026 launch schedule into oblivion.
The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.
The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA's primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.
The rapid decline of Antarctic sea ice since 2016 has triggered a dramatic shift in a crucial part of Earth’s climate system, scientists say.
In a paper published Wednesday, researchers documented a sharp salinity increase in a vast layer of the Southern Ocean, extending from 2,300 to 4,000 feet deep and encircling Antarctica. The shift reverses decades of freshening and echoes ocean changes usually associated with major global climate shifts over millennia but is now happening in just a few years.
The switch from a decades-long trend of freshening water to increasing salinity has implications that could extend beyond Antarctica. The layer, known as Antarctic Intermediate Water, spreads northward into the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans, transporting heat, carbon, oxygen, and nutrients toward the tropics, and even across the equator, said co-author Bishakhdatta Gayen, a researcher and professor at the University of Melbourne and at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences in Bengaluru, India.
A six-step method that starts at the contract, not the dashboard.
Four deductions separate raw contract supply from the circulating supply figure you can actually defend.
Pick a large stablecoin. Open three data sites. You will get three different circulating supply numbers.
None of them is lying. They are answering three different questions.
And the gap is not cosmetic. In June 2026, one widely used aggregator reported roughly $371 million more USDS than the Ethereum mainnet contract did. No hack. No stealth mint. Escrowed supply counted twice.
If you hold a stablecoin, lend against one, or carry one on a balance sheet, you need a figure you can defend in a risk meeting. Here is the six-step method.
Three published supply figures for the same stablecoin, read at the same block on the same day.
Why does the same stablecoin show three different circulating supply numbers?
Three structural reasons, and not one of them involves anybody being dishonest.
Different starting point. Some sources read totalSupply() straight off the token contract. Others rebuild supply by summing mint and burn events. Onchain data schemas now carry an explicit flag for which of the two is authoritative, row by row, because the two disagree often enough to matter.
Different exclusions. CoinGecko deducts locked addresses that project teams report to it (published methodology). Allium strips four separate categories out of raw supply before calling anything circulating.
Different scope. One token, or the whole family? USDS alone sat at $6.81B on 26 October 2026. Sky Ecosystem reported $11.48B of stablecoin supply the next day, because that figure counts USDS and DAI together as protocol liabilities.
Same dollar. Three honest answers.
Circulating supply is not a fact you look up. It is a definition you choose, then measure.
Step 1. Read the contract before you read the dashboard
Every real audit starts with one call: totalSupply() on the issuing contract, at a named block.
Not a screenshot. A block height.
Yearn’s risk team did exactly that to USDS on 9 September 2026 at block 25939320. Mainnet totalSupply() came back at 6,645,559,216, down 15% from their previous reading.
They also pulled the protocol’s own internal debt figure, so the token number could be checked against the issuer’s books rather than against another website. The full working is public.
That is the standard worth copying. Two independent reads, same block, both published.
Step 2. Subtract the supply that is not actually circulating
Raw total supply overstates circulation almost every time. Four buckets come out:
Pre-minted and unissued. Tokens the issuer created but has not released against backing.
Bridge-locked. Supply sitting in a source-chain escrow while a mirrored token trades somewhere else.
Stablecoin-backed. Supply locked only to mint another tracked stablecoin.
Permanently inaccessible. Burn addresses and dead contracts.
The bridge bucket is where most errors live. In that same September reassessment, native-escrow USDS fell from about $448M to $102M, escrowed sUSDS from about $812M to $343M, and LayerZero-locked USDS from roughly $48.7M to $6.67M. Miss those and a cross-chain total quietly counts real money twice.
Bridge escrow and locked balances move fast, and a supply audit has to re-read them every time.
Step 3. Do not count the yield-bearing wrapper twice
This one catches careful people.
sUSDS is not extra supply. It is a claim on USDS that has been supplied to the Sky Savings Rate module. One dollar of USDS wrapped into sUSDS is still one dollar of stablecoin liability, not two.
Count the base token as supply.
Count the wrapper as a holding of the base token.
Never add the two together.
Scale is why this matters. Roughly half of USDS supply sits in sUSDS, and the Ethereum sUSDS pool showed $4.85B on 26 October 2026. That is a lot of float to misclassify.
Adding the yield-bearing wrapper to the base token counts the same dollars twice.
A yield-bearing wrapper is a claim on supply. It is never new supply.
Step 4. Check what backs the supply, not just how big it is
Supply tells you the size of the liability. It tells you nothing about whether that liability is covered.
So pull the collateral figure next, from the same issuer, on the same day.
On 27 October 2026, Sky Ecosystem published $14.15B in Total Collateral against $11.48B in stablecoin supply.
That is roughly $1.23 of collateral behind every dollar of supply, which is the entire point of an overcollateralized design.
Two surfaces let you check it yourself instead of taking it on trust:
financial.skyeco.com for the balance sheet, Gross and Net Protocol Revenue, Protocol Surplus and Sky Reserves.
info.skyeco.com for the live onchain view of collateral composition, USDS and sUSDS.
Credit agencies have started running the same exercise. Moody’s assigned Sky Protocol a B3 issuer rating with a stable outlook on 7 October 2026, the first rating it has given any stablecoin protocol, after S&P Global affirmed B- on 1 October.
Both flagged reserve depth as the constraint. That is what an outside read of the collateral side looks like, and it is worth more than a logo on a trust page.
Collateral against supply, plus the two outside credit reads, as published in October 2026.
Step 5. Ask whether that supply can actually leave at a dollar
A supply number is only as good as the exit. Three questions:
Is there a direct conversion path with the issuer, or only a market?
What caps sit on that path?
What does using it cost?
Sky Protocol runs Peg Stability Modules, smart contracts that convert supported stablecoins into USDS and back at 1:1 directly with the protocol rather than against another trader, under governance-set caps. Moving between USDS and sUSDS carries no lockup in either direction.
Redemption depth is the part of a supply audit most people skip, and the part every stress event tests.
Step 6. Date the number, or bin it
Stablecoin supply moves daily. A figure without a timestamp is a rumour with decimal places.
Write the audit line in four fields: source, metric, value, block or date.
From 18 January 2027, permitted issuers must publish the monthly composition of their reserves on their own websites by noon on the last day of each month, and file weekly confidential reserve reports.
As Forbes noted, an accurate weekly reserve figure demands daily reconciliation between tokens outstanding onchain and reserves held at the custodian.
Monthly PDFs are becoming weekly reconciliation. Protocols that already publish live will barely feel it.
What does a finished circulating supply audit look like on USDS?
Six lines, dated 26 to 27 October 2026, each checkable in under ten minutes:
Mainnet token supply: $6.81B USDS, third largest dollar stablecoin.
Protocol family supply: $11.48B, USDS and DAI together.
Total Collateral: $14.15B, around $1.23 per dollar of supply.
Wrapper: sUSDS, roughly half the USDS float, excluded from the supply line.
Exit path: Peg Stability Modules at 1:1, governance-capped.
Outside read: rated by both Moody’s and S&P Global, so far the only stablecoin protocol with both.
A defensible number, with the working shown.
Why the Sky Savings Rate belongs in a supply audit
Here is the part most supply write-ups leave out.
Supply that pays nothing is a static liability. Supply that pays has to be funded, and that funding has to come from somewhere real.
The Sky Savings Rate is a variable rate set by Sky Governance and accessed by holding sUSDS.
It is funded from revenue Sky Protocol accrues as the Sky Agent Network, independent allocators including Spark, Grove, Osero, Keel and Obex, draws USDS liquidity under governance-set risk parameters and deploys it.
So when you audit the supply, audit the engine behind it:
Where does the yield come from?
Who sets the rate, and is the decision public?
Does the revenue appear on a published income statement?
Galaxy appears to have run some version of that test. On 23 September 2026 it added $100 million of sUSDS to its corporate treasury and approved sUSDS as eligible collateral across its institutional trading business.
Audit the supply. Then audit whatever pays it.
The 60-second circulating supply checklist
Run this before you quote any stablecoin supply figure:
Read totalSupply() at a named block.
Subtract pre-minted, bridge-locked, stablecoin-backed and inaccessible balances.
Exclude the yield-bearing wrapper from the supply line.
Pull collateral from the same issuer on the same day.
Confirm the redemption path and its caps.
Write the date next to the number.
Six steps. One figure you can put in front of a risk committee.
So what should circulating supply actually mean?
The stablecoin market sat near $308B in August 2026, below its May peak of $322.4B. That is a lot of dollars measured by methods most holders have never read.
Which leaves the question I actually want argued in the comments.
Does circulating supply mean tokens that exist, tokens that can move, or tokens someone can redeem at par today?
Pick one. Then run the six steps on whatever stablecoin you hold and post the number with its date underneath. I will check mine against yours.
A visualization shows the orbital path of the dwarf planet candidate 2026 ED138 in relation to the orbits of the solar system’s larger planets. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC /AURA / R. Proctor)
Astronomers sorting through data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile have found an icy world that has a good chance of joining Pluto in the solar system’s retinue of dwarf planets.
University of Washington astronomer Mario Jurić joined the astronomer who made the discovery, Matthew Holman of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to announce the findings today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Spokane, Wash.
Jurić, the Rubin team’s solar system lead scientist, said the observatory’s capabilities made it possible to detect and characterize the new dwarf planet candidate, known as 2026 ED138.
“Rubin is giving us an unprecedented capacity to explore the sky through a combination of speed, depth, and precision,” Jurić said in a news release. “And the discovery is just the beginning: Once we identify a new object, we can search back months, and sometimes even decades, finding it in images where nobody knew to look. This ability to both discover and ‘precover’ objects is transforming how quickly and accurately we can determine their orbits and understand the distant solar system.”
2026 ED138 traces a tilted orbital path that takes it well beyond Pluto, the solar system’s best-known dwarf planet. It’s currently at a distance of 46 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals the average distance between Earth and the sun. Pluto, by comparison, is currently about 40 AU from the sun.
Astronomers suspect ED138 formed billions of years ago closer to the sun before being flung into a wider orbit by gravitational interactions with Neptune.
Based on an analysis of its distance, brightness and assumed composition, ED138 is thought to be somewhere between 600 and 1,500 kilometers (373 to 932 miles) in diameter. At that size, an icy object should possess enough gravity to pull itself into a round shape — satisfying the primary physical criterion for a dwarf planet.
Rubin’s researchers analyze the data from those scans to find objects of interest — ranging from asteroids to gamma-ray bursts — and track them over time. On Oct. 13, Holman was running data through a search code that he developed with Kevin Napier, a colleague at the Center for Astrophysics. ED138 stood out due to its exceptional size and brightness.
“My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” Holman said. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”
To confirm the discovery, Holman, Jurić and their colleagues found 30 archived observations of ED138 dating back to March 4. The Asteroid Institute’s ADAM Precovery service found still more images of the object, going back to 2016, in the archives of a different astronomical survey.
The precovery data confirmed that ED138 was a special case.
“Finding an object this big, roughly 1,000 kilometers across, is something that happens maybe once in a generation,” Jurić said. “It’s the largest trans-Neptunian object found in about 20 years, and Rubin turned it up while we were still commissioning the telescope.”
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined dwarf planets as planetary objects that are big enough to crush themselves into a roundish shape — technically speaking, into a state of hydrostatic equilibrium — but not big enough to clear their orbital neighborhood.
So far, the IAU has classified five solar system objects as dwarf planets — including Ceres in the main asteroid belt, plus Pluto, Eris, Haumea and Makemake in the region beyond Neptune. 2026 ED138 joins a host of other celestial objects that are thought to be dwarf planets but haven’t yet been added to the IAU’s official list.
“The official list hasn’t moved since 2008,” Jurić told GeekWire in an email. “I’m not sure if there’s an active process that reviews candidates, and what are the timelines.”
Jurić and his colleagues hope additional observations will boost ED138’s chances of attaining true dwarf planethood.
“The next step in building the case would be to prove it’s round (in hydrostatic equilibrium),” he wrote. “The means to do that would be directly through occultations (and there’s a good chance of that, given it’s in a dense stellar field), and then thermal measurements plus modeling and light curves (or the absence of variability).”
Airborne micro particles can be a significant health hazard in a workshop, and thus it’s important to maintain a high standard of ventilation. But monitoring their concentration is also important, and thus there exists a range of sensors to help keep you safe. [WeSpeakEnglish] has taken this idea to the MAX, with a PM2.5 sensor that drives a very large wall mounted display. You’ll never be uncertain what the level is now!
The standout feature of this thing is a huge addressable LED seven segment display PCB, upon the back of which sits a tiny Seeed Studio Xiao board to which the particle sensor is hooked up. The software displays the particle count, and handily changes the colour as the number creeps upwards. Meanwhile should you wish to log the readings, the USB exposes a serial port upon which they are placed.
We can see this is a useful project for anywhere that is likely to have a high particle count, but it’s worth noting also that a large 7-segment display with an ESP32 board attached could have plenty of other uses. Meanwhile this is a nicely finished air quality monitor, but it’s certainly not the first we’ve seen.
In breathless press releases and posts, the company has touted its models’ ability to deliver scientific breakthroughs. But its IPO filing taps the brakes on just how fast its AI will lead to big discoveries.
Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work. This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place. Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.
A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great. But they still manage to get the job done. And, in a separate announcement, Hugging Face shared that it's now hosting a tool that does similar things on the DNA level.
The equivalent of vibe coding may have come to protein design—at least if you have access to a lab where you can sort the good designs from the dozens of failed ones.
The data center buildout could cause a massive increase in gas prices as companies scramble for limited supplies and infrastructure fails to meet demand.
Dating back to around 400 CE and made of dichroic glass, the Lycurgus Cup is notable for exhibiting different colors depending on the light. (It gets its name from the scene depicted on its surface, of King Lycurgus of Thrace.) Light it from the front, and the cup looks green; light it from behind, and the color changes to a deep red. University of Sheffield scientists have re-created the original recipe to produce a contemporary glass sculpture with the same optical effect.
The cup is considered one of the seven glass wonders of the world, one of just 40 glass cage cups that survived. Exactly why the unusual color effects of the Lycurgus Cup occurred was a mystery until 2007, when a team of scientists discovered the color shifts were due to the presence of nanoparticles in the glass—the result of Roman artisans adding finely ground gold and silver into the mix. Those nanoparticles change how the electrons in the cup vibrate in response to light so that the color one sees shifts with the observer’s vantage point.
As we reported in 2019, it’s a similar phenomenon to the one responsible for the shifting colors of 19th-century daguerreotypes due to the scattering properties of nanoparticles. The Romans added salt when they melted the silicon (sand) to make the glass, and those salts contained gold atoms. In the melting process, those atoms aggregate and produce nanoparticles, which in turn produce the colors. It’s how any stained glass is made. It's also similar to how the precise lattice-like structure of photonic crystals produces iridescent colors in nature, like the wings of butterflies, or opals.
Two orbiters have long outlasted their expected lifespans and completely reshaped our understanding of the Red Planet, all while operating 140 million miles from Earth.
Susanne Rust of the Los Angeles Times reports (paywalled) that industry executives knew for decades that microplastics were infiltrating the human body. Slashdot reader joshuark shares an excerpt from the report: Scientists today say we're just beginning to understand the harm that the tiny bits of plastic we drink, eat and breathe are doing to the human body. Internal memos among company scientists and executives obtained by The Times reveal that for at least half a century, the plastics industry has been aware of and concerned about the potential for microplastic contamination in the human body. But recently discovered chemical company documents dating back several decades show that industry scientists have long been aware of -- and concerned about -- the way microplastic particles migrate beyond the gut in animals and humans, depositing in important organs. And the potential for that knowledge to affect the plastic food packaging industry.
Their concern goes back to 1974 and a scientific meeting at a New York City hotel, where a German gastroenterologist presented a scientific paper that showed for the first time that ingested particles like microplastics could infiltrate the rest of the body. His presentation was largely overlooked by the government scientists in attendance but became a point of worried discussion among company scientists. Tracey Woodruff, professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, who reviewed the documents, said they indicate scientists and executives at major chemical companies have known and remained silent even as microplastics accumulated in tissues. She likened it to other industries that knew about pollutants -- greenhouse gases, asbestos and tobacco -- but did not take action to make them safer.
A spokesperson with the chemical industry's largest trade group took issue with that characterization. "Scientific debate over what the evidence shows is not silence. It is how sound science and effective policy advance," said Craig Davis, senior director of plastics chemistry at the American Chemistry Council. "Our industry is committed to advancing microplastics science by supporting independent research and policies that would do so."
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland's University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.
In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. And last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children's book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failuresthat Sparked Medical Marvels.
NASA SEES Interns Tackle Real-World Challenges in Lunar Exploration
The Matrix Team developed a sophisticated interactive dashboard for the IM-3 mission that allows users to vary engine, spacecraft, and orbital parameters to investigate the effect on propellant margins and landing zone availability.
The NASA STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) Internship Program at the University of Texas Center for Space Research places high school students on small, mission-focused research teams mentored by NASA, academic, and industry experts. During summer 2026, the SEES Mission Architecture Tool for Research, Integration, and eXploration (MATRIX) team focused on applying a method for measuring propellant mass in microgravity, where liquid fuel clings to tank walls instead of settling – a challenge central to NASA’s Artemis missions.
The MATRIX team was mentored by Dr. Kevin Crosby, who, along with colleagues at NASA, developed the Modal Propellant Gauging (MPG) approach to microgravity propellant mass gauging at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. MPG uses the acoustic response of propellant tanks to estimate the mass of fuel inside a tank. The method has been used successfully in several spaceflight experiments and is scheduled for demonstration on the Intuitive Machines IM-3 mission. The IM-3 lander, Trinity, is scheduled to touch down on the Moon in the Reiner Gamma region in 2027. The team developed models for predicting when MPG can take reliable readings during the mission, giving the interns direct experience with a technology preparing for spaceflight and lunar surface operations.
Reconstructing a Lunar Mission from Public Data
The MATRIX team relied entirely on publicly available sources, including Intuitive Machines’ published mission data. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) provided detailed trajectory records for the IM-1 and IM-2 missions. By comparing the IM-2 spacecraft’s reconstructed flight path with a model of its motion without engine thrust, the team identified engine burns and estimated the change in velocity associated with each burn.
Because a complete IM-3 trajectory is not public, the team wrote a reconstruction algorithm using published IM-1 and IM-2 flight data. To model fluid behavior, the team ran computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to estimate slosh dynamics within the tanks and conducted Monte Carlo simulations to predict the range of possible propellant states.
Identifying Windows for Measurement
The team’s analysis showed that MPG can take reliable readings during the two primary burns, Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI) and Powered Descent, and in some cases during Descent Orbit Insertion. The spacecraft’s starting mass had the greatest effect on how long each gauging window lasts. The MATRIX team also identified candidate IM-3 launch opportunities for 2027 and produced a landing analysis for the Reiner Gamma site that showed the distribution of possible landing sites near the target.
Presenting to the Scientific Community
The team briefed the Intuitive Machines propulsion group, walking the engineers through their methods and results and demonstrating that a rigorous analysis of an active lunar mission could be built from public data. The students presented their research, “Computational Models to Estimate Modal Propellant Gauging (MPG) Windows on the Intuitive Machines IM-3 Mission,” at the SEES Annual Symposium and the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Annual Conference. The team will present again at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Annual Meeting in San Francisco in December 2026.
“This high school team, in a period of less than a month, developed a depth of understanding and facility with advanced methods that rivals advanced graduate students in the field,” said Crosby. “Their work product is exceptional, and their presentation to Intuitive Machines engineers impressed everyone with the sophistication and creativity of their work. The SEES program has consistently provided a unique environment for students to demonstrate they can achieve far more than what is asked of them, even in the most advanced classes.”
The SEES program gives 11th and 12th grade students direct experience with the data, tools, and analytical methods used across the aerospace industry. By applying NASA and commercial mission data to an active lunar mission, the MATRIX team contributed analysis relevant to propellant management, a capability needed for in-space refueling, fuel depots, and sustained exploration of the Moon and beyond. Thank you to all the mentors, project assistants, and volunteers who have made SEES possible for over a decade.
The SEES Mission Architecture (MATRIX) Team: Raiymbek Abdy, The Woodlands, TX Emmanuel Bravo, Boca Raton, FL Winston Huang, San Francisco, CA Adrianna Krajnovic, Dallas, TX Marco Lo Cicero, Tomball, TX Henry Martin, Milwaukee, WI Reva Paul, Bethlehem, PA Swayam Sahoo, North Chelmsford, MA
Project Mentor: Dr. Kevin M. Crosby, Carthage College and Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium Project Assistant: Mauro Esquivel, mathematics teacher, McAllen, TX
The SEES project is supported by NASA cooperative agreement award number NNH15ZDA004C and is part of the NASA Science Activation Program portfolio, which connects learners with authentic NASA science experiences through partnerships with educators and community organizations.
In the world of silicon semiconductors, the process of creating transistors and similar structures involves various rounds of modifications and additions in order to create the requisite functional layers. A less involved approach would simply create these structures in-situ, with research the past years having focused on transition-metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) monolayers to do exactly this. Recently [Seok Young Min] et al. reported (paywalled, Phys.orgsummary) on creating transistors in-situ in a tungsten ditelluride (WTe2) monolayer.
By selectively changing parts of the top layer into tungsten oxide (WOx) as an insulator and other sections into n-type WS2 and p-type WSe2 the researchers were able to create functional MOSFETs, without the normally requisite grafting on of different materials. An obvious advantage of this is that this can be done at an atomic scale, potentially achieving densities significantly higher than with industry standard silicon semiconductor technology.
WTe2 is not the only TMDC that could be viable here, of course, with other researchers investigating the use of MoSe2 for a similar purpose, as in this research by [N. Lu] et al. from 2014. This being the creation of 2D semiconductors, referring to the thin layers of these monolayer TMDCs, along with potentially other materials such as graphene.
These elusive and reactive particles have been challenging to hold on to and even more challenging to study, but a new method paves the way for tests on the differences between matter and antimatter.
While oil is known to float, new research finds that over time it can permeate even extremely deep marine habitats, with animal populations declining by as much as 80 percent.
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