Synthetic Antiferromagnets

Researchers have discovered merons in synthetic antiferromagnets, advancing the field of spintronics toward more efficient, compact, and sustainable computing.

For the first time, teams from Germany and Japan have successfully identified collective topological spin formations known as merons within layered synthetic antiferromagnets.

Our everyday electronic devices, such as living room lights, washing machines, and televisions, operate thanks to electrical currents. Similarly, the functioning of computers is based on the manipulation of information by small charge carriers known as electrons. Spintronics, on the other hand, introduces a unique approach to this process.

Instead of the charge of electrons, the spintronic approach is to exploit their magnetic moment, in other words, their spin, to store and process information – aiming to make the computers of the future more compact, fast, and sustainable. 

One way of processing information based on this approach is to use the magnetic vortices called skyrmions or, alternatively, their still little understood and rarer cousins called ‘merons’.   READ MORE...

Signal Detected in Human Brain

Scientists have identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain, revealing just how much we still have to learn about its mysterious inner workings.

Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realized.


Back in 2020, researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece reported a mechanism in the brain's outer cortical cells that produces a novel 'graded' signal all on its own, one that could provide individual neurons with another way to carry out their logical functions.


By measuring the electrical activity in sections of tissue removed during surgery on epileptic patients and analyzing their structure using fluorescent microscopy, the neurologists found individual cells in the cortex used not just the usual sodium ions to 'fire', but calcium as well.     READ MORE...

Energy-Efficient Spintronics Computing

Spintronics is a promising approach to computer technology that uses the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons to process information, potentially making computers faster and more energy-efficient. Researchers have been experimenting with magnetic whirls, or skyrmions, and recently enhanced their diffusion rate by tenfold using synthetic antiferromagnets, paving the way for efficient spin-based computing.




Researchers in Germany and Japan have been able to increase the diffusion of magnetic whirls, so-called skyrmions, by a factor of ten.

In today’s world, our lives are unimaginable without computers. Up until now, these devices process information using primarily electrons as charge carriers, with the components themselves heating up significantly in the process. Active cooling is thus necessary, which comes with high energy costs. 

Spintronics aims to solve this problem: Instead of utilizing the electron flow for information processing, it relies on their spin or their intrinsic angular momentum. This approach is expected to have a positive impact on the size, speed, and sustainability of computers or specific components.

Magnetic Whirls Store and Process Information
Science often does not simply consider the spin of an individual electron, but rather magnetic whirls composed of numerous spins. These whirls called skyrmions emerge in magnetic metallic thin layers and can be considered as two-dimensional quasi-particles. 

On the one hand, the whirls can be deliberately moved by applying a small electric current to the thin layers; on the other hand, they move randomly and extremely efficiently due to diffusion. 

The feasibility of creating a functional computer based on skyrmions was demonstrated by a team of researchers from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), led by Professor Dr. Mathias Kläui, using an initial prototype. This prototype consisted of thin, stacked metallic layers, some only a few atomic layers thick.  READ MORE...

Oceans Release Microplastics into Atmosphere

During stormy weather, sea spray can carry microplastics into the air. The photo was taken during a trip of the research vessel Heincke off the Norwegian coast in June 2021. Credit: Alvise Vianello



New research identifies the composition and origins of the microplastics.

Microplastic particles can be found in the marine atmosphere, even in the world’s most isolated regions. These minuscule particles originate from land but are also released back into the atmosphere from the ocean, according to a study led by Dr. Barbara Scholz-Böttcher of the University of Oldenburg, with collaboration from German and Norwegian researchers. The team studied air samples from several locations on the Norwegian coast extending to the Arctic. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

“With our study, we present data on the mass load of different types of plastic in the marine atmosphere for the first time,” said Isabel Goßmann, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oldenburg’s Institute for Chemistry and Biology of the Marine Environment (ICBM) and first author of the paper. The research team collected the samples during an expedition with the Research Vessel Heincke in 2021.

The northernmost destination was Bear Island, the most southerly island of the Svalbard archipelago which lies halfway between the mainland and the archipelago’s largest island, Spitsbergen. The team used two different devices to collect air samples. The devices actively pumped in the air and were mounted on the bow of the research vessel at a height of twelve meters.

Different types of plastics identified
The scientists analyzed the air samples using pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. With this method, they were able to identify and quantify the different types of plastics in the atmosphere through thermal degradation and selective analysis. They then performed model calculations and reconstructed the sources and distribution paths of the particles, each of which is just a few thousandths of a millimeter in size.

The analysis revealed the omnipresence of polyester particles. Polyethylene terephthalate particles, which presumably entered the atmosphere in the form of textile fibers, were detected in all samples. Other plastic types were also present, including polypropylene polycarbonate and polystyrene.    READ MORE...

Green Path for Hydrogen

Hydrogen has great promise as a low-emission fuel source. It burns clean, generating only water as a by-product, and when it’s produced through electrolysis by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, the entire life cycle can be very environmentally friendly.

But the use of hydrogen has never reached its potential as a renewable fuel, mostly because its production process drives up the cost. Most hydrogen today is still produced as a by-product of fossil-fuel refinement—using methane with carbon monoxide as a by-product. 

Meanwhile, the hydrogen produced by electrolysis represents less than 1 percent of all the world’s hydrogen production. In order for hydrogen to be a viable source of clean energy, the cost of electrolysis needs to be much lower.

Sharaf Alsharif, a researcher at the Oldenburger OFFIS Institute for Information Technology in Oldenburg, Germany, believes digital twins could help bring down the cost of clean hydrogen production.

Digital twins are computer-simulation programs that can track and adjust the operations of a physical device in great detail. The close monitoring of hydrogen electrolyzers that digital twins provide could help streamline the devices’ operation and bring down the cost of electrolysis as a result.  READ MORE...

India is Growing its Economy

India is poised to become the world’s second-largest economy by 2075, leapfrogging not just Japan and Germany, but the U.S., too, says Goldman Sachs.

Currently, India is the world’s fifth-largest economy, behind Germany, Japan, China and the U.S.

On top of a burgeoning population, driving the forecast is the country’s progress in innovation and technology, higher capital investment, and rising worker productivity, the investment bank wrote in a recent report.

“Over the next two decades, the dependency ratio of India will be one of the lowest among regional economies,” said Goldman Sachs Research’s India economist, Santanu Sengupta.

A country’s dependency ratio is measured by the number of dependents against the total working-age population. A low dependency ratio indicates that there are proportionally more working-age adults who are able to support the youth and elderly.

Sengupta added that the key to drawing out the potential of India’s rapidly growing population is to boost the participation of its labor force. And Sengupta forecasts that India will have one of the lowest dependency ratios among large economies for the next 20 years.

“So that really is the window for India to get it right in terms of setting up manufacturing capacity, continuing to grow services, continuing the growth of infrastructure,” he said.

India’s government has placed a priority on infrastructure creation, especially in the setting up of roads and railways. The country’s recent budget aims to continue the 50-year interest-free loan programs to state governments in order to spur investments in infrastructure.

Goldman Sachs believes that this is an appropriate time for the private sector to scale up on creating capacity in manufacturing and services in order to generate more jobs and absorb the large labor force.  READ MORE...

Germany, European Union, and Twitter

A senior German official said on Thursday Twitter should join other tech firms in being directly monitored by the European Commission, saying the company’s erratic behaviour under new owner Elon Musk posed a threat to free speech.

Sven Giegold, the state secretary in charge of competition policy at Germany’s economy ministry, pointed to Twitter’s abrupt suspension of journalists’ accounts and restrictions on the access to some links.

In a letter to two European Commissioners, Giegold called on the EU to launch an investigation and said the Commission should act to prevent what he called Twitter’s “anti-competitive behaviour”.

Twitter did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The European Commission confirmed receiving the letter and said it would reply in due course, adding that it was following the developments at Twitter closely.

“General terms and conditions that change almost every hour, erratic justifications for extensive restrictions on links and the blocking of journalists threaten freedom of competition and pose a risk to freedom of expression, information and the press,” Giegold wrote on Twitter, while sharing his letter.  READ MORE...

Moving On With FCAS Warplane Development

Scale models of the Franco-German-Spanish Future Combat Air System (FCAS / SCAF), 

Europe's next-generation fighter jet, are seen in Paris, France, February 20, 2020. 

REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

BERLIN/PARIS, Nov 18 (Reuters) - France, Germany and Spain have reached agreement on starting the next phase of development of a new fighter jet dubbed FCAS, Europe's largest defence project at an estimated cost of more than 100 billion euros($103.4 billion), the German government said on Friday.

The Defence Ministry said in a statement that an industrial agreement was achieved after intense negotiations, confirming an earlier Reuters story saying the three countries and their respective industries had struck a deal.

The ministry said it was agreed at the highest government level that a cooperative approach on an equal footing would be pursued in the project, which is under overall French responsibility.

The Spanish Defence Ministry said Madrid would spend 2.5 billion euros ($2.58 billion) on the project, of which 525 million euros ($542 million) would be paid in 2023. The ministry said that the cabinet agreed to this expenditure but did not give other details.  READ MORE...

Most Read German Newspapers

BILD
With a circulation of currently about 1,37 sold million copies daily, the BILD newspaper published by the Axel-Springer Publishing Company is Germany’s largest and most popular tabloid. The online version of this paper also gets a lot of hits each day. If you like a mixture of news, gossip, and sensationalism, be sure to bookmark bild.de.
www.bild.de

DIE ZEIT
“Independent, liberal and often at odds with the rest of the world” is how the former publisher, Countess Dönhoff, once described the weekly newspaper, DIE ZEIT, which has enriched the German newspaper scene each Thursday since 1946.
www.zeit.de

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has appeared under the title of “Zeitung für Deutschland” (Newspaper for Germany) since 1949. Conservative political views, a feature section leaning towards the left and a liberal understanding of the business world - that is how one of the paper's earlier editors, Friedrich Karl Fromme, characterized the profile of the quality newspaper. These properties are also reflected in the independent online service, FAZ.NET.
www.faz.net                             TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

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Germany To Legalize Cannabis

BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany on Wednesday set out plans to legalise cannabis, in a move promised by Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government that would make it one of the first countries in Europe to make weed legal.

Health Minister Karl Lauterbach presented a cornerstone paper on planned legislation to regulate the controlled distribution and consumption of cannabis for recreational purposes among adults.

Acquiring and possessing up to 20 to 30 grams of recreational cannabis for personal consumption would also be made legal.

The coalition government struck an agreement last year to introduce legislation during its four-year term to allow the controlled distribution of cannabis in licensed shops.  READ MORE...

French People Urged to Save Energy

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday that his country was ready to deliver gas to Germany this coming winter should Europe's gas squeeze make such a move necessary, urging French citizens to reduce their energy consumption in order to stave off rationing and cuts.


Macron said French gas could help Germany to produce more electricity which, in turn, would allow Germany to contribute electricity to the French power grid during peak hours.


"We are going to complete the gas connections that will allow us to deliver gas to Germany," Macron told reporters after a video call with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.


Both Germany and France are scrambling to replenish gas reserves after Russia curtailed deliveries in retaliation for western support for Ukraine in its war with Russia.


Germany is more dependent on Russian gas than France, which generates most of its electricity in nuclear power stations.  READ MORE...

Raining Diamonds Across the Universe

Uranus and Neptune, ice giants where scientists believe diamond rain falls below the surface.

It could be raining diamonds on planets throughout the universe, scientists suggested Friday, after using common plastic to recreate the strange precipitation believed to form deep inside Uranus and Neptune.

Scientists had previously theorized that extremely high pressure and temperatures turn hydrogen and carbon into solid diamonds thousands of kilometers below the surface of the ice giants.

Now new research, published in Science Advances, inserted oxygen into the mix, finding that "diamond rain" could be more common than thought.

Ice giants like Neptune and Uranus are thought to be the most common form of planet outside our Solar System, which means diamond rain could be occurring across the universe.

Dominik Kraus, a physicist at Germany's HZDR research lab and one of the study's authors, said that diamond precipitation was quite different to rain on Earth.

Under the surface of the planets is believed to be a "hot, dense liquid", where the diamonds form and slowly sink down to the rocky, potentially Earth-size cores more than 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) below, he said.

There fallen diamonds could form vast layers that span "hundreds of kilometers or even more", Kraus told AFP.

While these diamonds might not be shiny and cut like a "a nice gem on a ring", he said they were formed via similar forces as on Earth.

Aiming to replicate the process, the research team found the necessary mix of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen in a readily available source—PET plastic, which is used for everyday food packaging and bottles.

Kraus said that while the researchers used very clean PET plastic, "in principle the experiment should work with Coca-Cola bottles".  READ MORE...

Nomadic Horse Warriors That Invaded Europe

The charge of the Huns led by Attila (lived circa A.D. 406 to 453). 

(Image credit: SPCOLLECTION via Alamy Stock Photo)

The Huns were nomadic warriors, likely from Central Asia, who are best known for invading and terrorizing Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and hastening the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. They were expert horsemen known for their ferocity in battle and their ruthlessness toward conquered peoples.

Under their brilliant military leader Attila (A.D. 406 to 453), known by Christians of the time as "the scourge of God," the Huns carved out a huge empire that encompassed large swathes of present-day Russia, Hungary and other parts of Europe, including Germany and France. 

Attila's army became so powerful that both the Western and Eastern Roman Empires regularly paid tribute to keep these warriors from attacking and plundering Roman provinces. But the Huns' empire didn't last. After Attila's death, the empire was divided between his three sons, who fought one another and were unable to keep the empire intact.



Today, the name "Hun" is synonymous with any barbaric, uncouth and destructive person, and the term conjures up images of mounted warriors involved in acts of abject cruelty, brutality and bellicosity. 

For centuries, this stereotype, which originated with Roman writers who suffered from the Huns' depredations, was the dominant image of the Huns. But the story of the Huns is much more complex than these images suggest.  READ MORE...

Medival Graves Found in Germany

Early medieval weapons and jewelry found in southwestern Germany near the Danube River. 

(Image credit: State Office for the Preservation of Monuments in the RPS / Yvonne Mühlei)

Archaeological treasures, including Stone Age pottery and medieval graves with swords and jewelry, have revealed a long history of human habitation near the Danube River in Germany.

At the site, in the Geisingen-Gutmadingen district of Tuttlingen, in southwestern Germany, archaeologists discovered one grave from the Neolithic, or Stone Age, that dates to the third millennium B.C. and contains distinctive pottery from the Corded Ware culture. They also found 140 early medieval graves, dating to between A.D. 500 and 600, that contain goods including swords, lances, shields, bone combs, drinking glasses and earrings.

"Our Gutmadingen district is probably much older than we previously assumed," Mayor Martin Numberger said in a statement. The district had previously been dated to 1273 based on the first written records of settlement there.

The finds were made by a team from archaeology firm ArchaeoTask GmbH in an area near the Danube river where a rainwater retention pond is planned. The Stone Age grave points to the presence of a The Corded Ware people, who are now known mostly for their pottery decorated by geometric lines formed by pressing cord into clay and leaving the impressions to dry. These people were probably pastoralists who kept animals such as cows and sheep, and some also practiced early farming of crops such as barley. Graves from this period are rare in southwestern Germany, according to local officials.

The early medieval graves date to the century after the end of the Western Roman Empire, which fell in 476 A.D. when the German warlord Odoacer deposed the Roman emperor Romulus Augustus. This period is part of what is known as the Migration Period, or the Völkerwanderung, when various tribes in Europe moved around, often conquering one another and pushing each other into new territories. Historians consider this period the transition between antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  READ MORE...

Europe Faces Historic Drought

Water levels in rivers across Europe are dropping in the historic drought, revealing “hunger stones” 

carved with centuries-old warnings of famine and hardship. PETR DAVID JOSEK AP

Water levels have dropped in major rivers across Europe as the region suffers under a historic drought. In those dry riverbeds, centuries-old warning messages have emerged, locals report. 

The “horrifying” boulders are known as “Hungersteine,” or “Hunger Stones,” local German reporter Olaf Koens said in an Aug. 11 tweet. 

One of these stones is embedded in the Elbe River, which runs from the mountains of Czechia through Germany to the North Sea, POLITICO journalist Aitor Hernández-Morales tweeted the same day.

The stone, dating back to a drought in 1616, is once again visible in the dry riverbed, Hernández-Morales said. The warning reads, “Wenn du mich seehst, dann weine” – “If you see me, weep.” 

“Hunger stones” like this one were used as “hydrological landmarks” across central Europe, NPR reported when the stones last surfaced during a 2018 drought.

These stones are “chiselled with the years of hardship and the initials of authors lost to history,” a team of Czech researchers wrote in a 2013 study. “The basic inscriptions warn of the consequences of drought. 

It expressed that drought had brought a bad harvest, lack of food, high prices and hunger for poor people.” The stones commemorate historic droughts, the researchers said.  READ MORE...

Extinct Pathogens Destroyed Civilizations

Thousands of years ago, across the Eastern Mediterranean, multiple Bronze Age civilizations took a distinct turn for the worse at around the same time.

The Old Kingdom of Egypt and the Akkadian Empire both collapsed, and there was a widespread societal crisis across the Ancient Near East and the Aegean, manifesting as declining populations, destruction, reduced trade, and significant cultural changes.

As usual, fingers have been pointed at climate change and shifting allegiances. But scientists have just found a new culprit in some old bones.

In remains excavated from an ancient burial site on Crete, in a cave called Hagios Charalambos, a team led by archaeogeneticist Gunnar Neumann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany found genetic evidence of bacteria responsible for two of history's most significant diseases – typhoid fever and plague.

Therefore, the researchers said, widespread illnesses caused by these pathogens cannot be discounted as a contributing factor in the societal changes so widespread around 2200 to 2000 BCE.

"The occurrence of these two virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete," they wrote in their paper, "emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond."  READ MORE...

Faster Than Light Travel

For decades, we've dreamed of visiting other star systems. There's just one problem – they're so far away, with conventional spaceflight it would take tens of thousands of years to reach even the closest one.


Physicists are not the kind of people who give up easily, though. Give them an impossible dream, and they'll give you an incredible, hypothetical way of making it a reality. Maybe.

In a 2021 study by physicist Erik Lentz from Göttingen University in Germany, we may have a viable solution to the dilemma, and it's one that could turn out to be more feasible than other would-be warp drives.

This is an area that attracts plenty of bright ideas, each offering a different approach to solving the puzzle of faster-than-light travel: achieving a means of sending something across space at superluminal speeds.

There are some problems with this notion, however. Within conventional physics, in accordance with Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, there's no real way to reach or exceed the speed of light, which is something we'd need for any journey measured in light-years.

That hasn't stopped physicists from trying to break this universal speed limit, though.

While pushing matter past the speed of light will always be a big no-no, spacetime itself has no such rule. In fact, the far reaches of the Universe are already stretching away faster than its light could ever hope to match.  READ MORE...

Slash and Burn Civilization

A new study by the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution has revealed that people in Europe used slash-and-burn methods to make land usable for agriculture during the Mesolithic period.

The team took core drill samples in the Ammer Valley in Germany and reconstructed the paleoclimate through a pollen analyses on micro and macro charcoal remains. The study, published in the “Journal of Quaternary Science” reveals that the samples date from around 10,100 and 9,800 years ago and suggests that the open and moisture-rich vegetation at the time was dominated by natural fires.

The Mesolithic began with the Holocene, a climate change that saw a warm period about 11,700 years ago which also brought about reforestation of pine, birch and hazel. The herds of ice-age steppe animals such as reindeer or mammoth were replaced by forest animals such as deer and wild boar.

“Typical for the Mesolithic are so-called microliths – small flint implements, which at the beginning of the Mesolithic were mostly made in a triangular and later a quadrangular fashion. Numerous artefacts of this type have been recovered from the Mesolithic scattered finds of Rottenburg-Siebenlinden near Tübingen, Germany,” explains Shaddai Heidgen, a PhD student at S-HEP.

The landscape of the Ammer Valley changed during the Mesolithic period, creating favourable conditions for Mesolithic settlements such as the ones found in Rottenburg-Siebenlinden. The fires created attractive sites for herbivores as well as pioneer vegetation such as hazelnuts.

According to the study, the people of that time began to use the slash-and-burn methods specifically for their own purposes, starting 9,500 years ago.Heidgen said: “Our charcoal and pollen analyses show that the frequent fires in a landscape increasingly dominated by deciduous trees were controlled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Moreover, the archaeological horizons of the Mesolithic settlement area coincide with the rather weak but frequent fires.”  READ MORE...

Sugar Beneath the Ocean

Many coastal areas around the world are home to lush green meadows — all thanks to seagrasses.

As the only flowering plants growing in marine environments, these meadows are magic: One square kilometer of seagrass stores nearly twice as much carbon as land-based forests, and it does so 35 times faster. This makes seagrasses one of the most efficient global sinks of carbon dioxide on Earth.

And this isn't the only remarkable thing about them, a new study has revealed. Submerged beneath the waves, seagrass ecosystems hold colossal reserves of sugar we never knew existed before, with roughly 32 billion cans of Coca-Cola's worth of sweet stuff hiding in the seabed.

Naturally, this holds major implications for mitigating climate change and carbon storage.

Sweet, sweet seagrass
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported in a study published in the journal Nature Eco­logy & Evol­u­tion that seagrasses release colossal amounts of sugar into their soils, which is also known as the rhizosphere. Under the seagrass, sugar concentrations were unexpectedly at least 80 times higher than previously measured in marine environments.  READ MORE...