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Experts explain why misleading documentaries about sharks can be problematic. When Brendon Sing first encountered sharks he was as a young boy behind the safety of aquarium glass in his native South Africa. Like many children of his generation, Brendon’s limited knowledge about sharks came from the 1975 smash-hit movie “Jaws,” which meant he was … More Fear factor: How sensationalised shark documentaries undermine conservation efforts
Who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific? Where did they come from? How did they get there, and how do we know? The answers to these and more questions are all explored in this mesmerizing novel by Pacific historian Christina Thompson. For over a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the most secluded islands in … More Book Club: ‘Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia’ by Christina Thompson
We all love penguins. Clumsy and awkward on land, stealthy and precise underwater- these charismatic creatures have captured our hearts ever since the release of March of the Penguins. Unfortunately, penguin populations across the globe (especially in South Africa and Antarctica) are facing hardship. Researchers have recently concluded that African penguin populations, as well as other … More Penguin Problems: Are human-induced food shortages driving population declines?
It seems ironic that shortly after an amendment to the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill stating octopuses to be ‘sentient beings’ capable of a range of human-like emotions such as joy, pleasure, excitement, as well as pain, distress, and harm, plans of the word’s first commercial octopus farm arose. Yet that is exactly what happened with … More Farming Fiasco: The world’s first commercial octopus breeding programme
More in science
The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos. The post A Single, ‘Naked’ Black Hole Rewrites the History of the Universe first appeared on Quanta Magazine
Systems thinkers fail because they ignore an important fact: systems fight back.
Please don’t ask me about the illegal way…I’m not telling you
A few more interesting tidbits from the concluding half-day of the DOE ECMP PI meeting: Dmitri Basov showed some of the remarkable experiments enabled by layers of MoOCl2, which in the IR is an intrinsically hyperbolic optical material. This material has unusual plasmonic properties considering its high resistivity. These include peculiar cavity effects such as modifying superfluid density of a proximally coupled superconductor. Leonid Butov explained some remarkable evidence for superfluidity of indirect excitons excited in the moire bilayer of MoSe2/WSe2. Low temperature mean free paths of these objects can exceed hundreds of microns (!). Cui-Zu Chang showed evidence that truly stoichiometric FeTe is actually a superconductor with a critical temperature of about 13.5 K, rather than the usual thinking that it is an antiferromagnetic metal. Apparently an extra 2% of interstitial iron is enough to kill superconductivity and induce AFM order. James McIver presented an example of how nonlinear optical effects in an optically driven (Floquet) Weyl semimetal seem to vary linearly with driving field - anomalously strong. Dmytro Bozhko showed a really neat technique, using Brillouin light scattering to map out the dispersion of phonons and magnons in YIG, and to extend this approach with a special hollow-core optical fiber to low temperatures with the motivation of probing magnon superfluidity in a particular antiferromagnetic insulator. Ray Ashoori used his characteristically pretty quantum capacitance measurement technique to examine the density+displacement field+magnetic field phase diagram of 5-layer rhombohedral graphene, revealing some surprising fractional Chern insulator states. Claudia Ojeda-Aristizabal discussed some mesoscopic transport measurements in bilayer graphene, where an adsorbed layer of spin-containing CuPc molecules seems to affect both decoherence and the trigonal warping contribution to it (related to intervalley scattering). Feng Wang and You Zhou both discussed recent measurements looking at Wigner crystals and their properties in 2D TMDs, through a variety of means. Liuyan Zhao showed some very rich physics obtained in studies that moiré stack bilayers of the van der Waals insulating magnet CrI3. Unfortunately I missed the last talk because of the need to head to the airport. Overall, the meeting was very good. Program PI meetings can tend to become less about telling coherent scientific stories and more about trying to show everything someone has done in the last three years. This meeting avoided that, with clear talks that generally focused on one main result, and that made it much more engaging. As good as tools for virtual gatherings have become, there really is no substitute for an in-person event when you can just talk to someone by the coffee about some new idea.
Western wildfires are producing massive plumes of smoke that have, in recent years, clouded eastern skies. But a new study finds that, paradoxically, heat from fires is reshaping weather patterns in ways that are actually improving overall air quality on the East Coast. Read more on E360 →
