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What is Dark Matter? Did any on you already know of it?

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What is Dark Matter? Did any on you already know of it?

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Where else do you think you can use this technology and what impact do you think it’ll have on society. What technology do you think can be combined with this machine?

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Thanks for reading!

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Did you know about Dark Matter and dark energy making so much of the universe and that we can’t see? Can you imagine what else we don’t know and could flip our whole understanding of the universe around? What are some theories you have or heard of that you think are interested?

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Once we do find a new equation and theory that works, we can understand the workings of our universe better and have a more accurate understanding of what happened  from the big bang to now, us living on earth.

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Gravitational Lensing: When something has so much gravitational effect and pull that light gets snapped in half.

Dark matter: doesn’t emit light, has no reaction with itself, has mass, can have gravitational force. Is underlying in everything there is and makes up for most of a matter's mass.

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How research proved Lambda-CDA is flawed

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How research proved Lambda-CDA is flawed

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In a research study to study this gravitational lensing in giant galaxy clusters there was 10 times more of it than expected, meaning there was way more dark matter in these clusters than predicted in computer simulation and usually seen. This means the Lambda-CDA theory’s propositions are off and something is wrong.

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History of the Universe using Lambda-CDA

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History of the Universe using Lambda-CDA

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Lambda-CDA theory basically states that 5 percent of the universe is made of baryonic material, which is the stuff that makes up everything we can see, like planets, stars, pencils etc., 68 percent is dark energy, the force that is behind the continuous expansion of our universe, and 27 is dark matter. It is the basis of a lot of our theories in how things come into existence and a lot of what we know of the universe's history

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Putting up the shark fin ban would just make the shark fin market “go underground” because of the demand and low penalties of shark finning.

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If this continues then more species may become threatened or become extinct whether that be sharks or other animals because of sharks being the apex predator and keeping the balance of the ecosystem.

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Shark finning is simply stripping the animal of its fins and throwing it back into the water to die. Shark finning is banned in the USA since the year 2000 which leaves us to wonder why it is still sold in 10/12 states in the USA.

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Yellow: Electricity Topic
Purple: Space Topic
Green: Ecology Topic
Blue: Chemistry Topic

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It's built like this, two systems are in this machine, each containing two capacitors which are devices that hold electrical energy and one transistor that amplifies energy. One of them is connected to a transducer that basically measures energy. How this machine utilizes this is by measuring how much electrons have gone through a barrier using this tunnelling, through a process. The whole process goes like this an energy, and in this application, the energy in motion is turned into an electrical signal that changes the shape of the barrier. This then allows electrons to go through the barrier, so at the end by measuring the voltage of the capacitor of one system without a transducer and comparing it to one with one, we can know how much electrons were passed through the barrier due to this process, and so can find out how much acceleration there was and motion there was.

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Shantanu Chakrabartty's laboratory has been working to create sensors that can run on the least amount of energy. His lab has been so successful at building smaller and more efficient sensors, that they've run into a roadblock in the form of a fundamental law of physics.

Sometimes, however, when you hit what appears to be an impenetrable roadblock, you just have to turn to quantum physics and tunnel through it. That's what Chakrabartty and other researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis did.

The development of these self-powered quantum sensors from the lab of Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Systems & Electrical Engineering, was published online Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Communications.

The roadblock that inspired this research is the threshold effect.

"Imagine there is an apple hanging from a tree," Chakrabartty said. "You can shake the tree a little bit, but the apple doesn't fall. You have to give it enough of a tug to shake the apple loose." That tug is akin to a threshold energy. "It's the minimal amount of energy needed to move an electron over a barrier." If you cannot move the electron over the barrier, you cannot create current.

But naturally occurring quantum mechanical phenomenon move electrons across barriers all the time. The research team took advantage of this to build a self-powered device that, with a small initial energy input, can run on its own for more than a year.
This is how it's built
The device is simple and inexpensive to build. All it requires is four capacitors and two transistors.

From these six parts, Chakrabartty's team built two dynamical systems, each with two capacitors and a transistor. The capacitors hold a small initial charge, about 50 million electrons each.

They added a transducer to one of the systems and coupled it to the property they were measuring. In one application, the team measured ambient micromotion using a piezoelectric accelerometer, a type of transducer that turns mechanical energy (such as movement of molecules in the air) into electric signals.
This is what you need to know
Quantum physics. At least some of the more unusual properties of subatomic particles, particularly tunneling.

Imagine a hill, Chakrabartty said. "If you want to get to the other side, you have to physically climb the hill. Quantum tunneling is more like going through the hill."

The beauty of this, he said, is that when the hill is a certain shape, you get very unique, dynamical properties that could last for years.

In this case, the "hill" is actually a barrier called a Fowler-Nordheim tunneling barrier. It's positioned between the plate of a capacitor and a semiconductor material; it's less than 100 atoms thick.

By building the barrier in a certain way, Chakrabartty said, "you can control the flow of electrons. You can make it reasonably slow, down to one electron every minute and still keep it reliable." At that rate, the dynamical system runs like a timekeeping device -- without any batteries -- for more than a year.
This is how it works
To measure ambient motion, a tiny piezoelectric accelerometer was connected to the sensor. Researchers mechanically shook the accelerometer; its motion was then transformed into an electric signal. This signal changed the shape of the barrier, which, thanks to the rules of quantum physics, changed the rate at which the electrons tunneled through the barrier.

To make sense of what happened, the process needs to be read as a sort of backward Rube Goldberg machine.

The probability that a certain number of electrons will tunnel through the barrier is a function of the barrier's size. The size of the barrier is determined by the energy produced by the piezoelectric transducer, which in turn, is determined by the magnitude of the acceleration -- how much it shook.

By measuring the sensor capacitors' voltage and counting how many electrons were missing, Darshit Mehta, a PhD student in Chakrabartty's lab and the lead author on the paper, was able to determine the total acceleration energy.

Of course, to be put to practical use, these extremely sensitive devices would likely be moving around -- on a truck, keeping track of the ambient temperature of in cold-chain management of vaccines, for example. Or in your blood, monitoring glucose.

That's why each device is actually two systems, a sensing system and a reference system. At the outset, the two are nearly identical, only the sensing system was connected to a transducer while the reference system was not.

Both systems were engineered so that electrons tunneled at the same rate, destined to deplete their capacitors identically had there not been any outside forces at play.

Because the sensing system was affected by signals it received from the transducer, its electrons tunneled at different times than the reference system. After the experiments, the research team read the voltage in both the sensing and reference system capacitors. They used the difference in the two voltages to find the true measurements from the transducer.

For some applications, this final result is sufficient. The next step for Chakrabartty's team is to overcome the computational challenge of more precisely recreating what happened in the past -- how exactly were the electrons affected? When did an electron tunnel through the barrier? How long did it take to tunnel?

One of the goals of Mehta's PhD thesis is to use multiple devices to reconstruct the past. "The information is all stored on the device, we just have to come up with clever signal processing to solve this," Chakrabartty said.

Ultimately, these sensors hold promise for everything from continuous monitoring of glucose levels inside the human body, to possibly recording neural activity without using batteries.

"Right now, the platform is generic," Chakrabartty said. "It just depends on what you couple to the device. As long as you have a transducer that can generate an electrical signal, it can self-power our sensor-data-logger."

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spintronics; physics; energy technology; detectors; solar energy; quantum physics; electricity; engineering and construction

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Quantum tunneling pushes the limits of self-powered sensors: With just a 50-million-electron jumpstart, sensors can power themselves for more than a year

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Shantanu Chakrabartty's laboratory has been working to create sensors that can run on the least amount of energy. His lab has been so successful at building smaller and more efficient sensors, that they've run into a roadblock in the form of a fundamental law of physics.

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Welcome to Anson and Louis's Monthly Science Recap Event. Here is their newest edition documented!

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All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. - Galileo Galilei

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Supercooling water having 2 forms may be a new discovery but do you think that this knowledge will somehow benefit humanity? Since the duration is so tiny do you think that it would even be important?  Explain your reasoning (either way).

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The hunting of sharks provides food and sale to people but is it worth it? Knowing that sharks are being overfished because of demand until the point where the species is on the brink of extinction would you still pick up the bowl of shark fin soup? Considering all the effects on the ecosystem that it would impact.  Explain your reasoning (either way)

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In quantum physics, electrons could be both particles and waves. Therefore, having a chance to "tunnel" through barriers as waves unlike other particles.

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Quantum Physics Theory: electrons can be both particles and waves

Transistor: a device that can either amplify (make bigger/larger)  and make input much larger when becoming output, or as a switch, in this case, used as an amplifier.

Capacitor: a device that stores electrical energy, sort of like a cup (capacitor) to hold water(electrical energy)

Transducer: a device that changes energy from one form to another, ex. motion to electricity

Piezoelectric Accelerometer: a transducer device that measures mechanical variables by using the piezoelectric effect (the application of force onto the object) ex. One application is measuring ambient motion by using a Piezoelectric Accelerometer to change mechanical energy from moving molecules to electrical signals.

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Supercooled water has been caught morphing between two forms.
We are still learning everyday. One of the most recent discoveries involve water being able to stay liquid in colder temperatures. Normally water freezes at 0 degrees but in this case where ice of high density that was melted by an laser was able to stay liquid for a tiny bit of time before expanding and turning back into a solid. Though because of the difficulty of these experiments we're only able to observe the supercooling with atmospheric pressure. Though there is still much to learn about supercooling and water itself, Nilsson who was one of the scientists conducting the experiment wishes that we can discover more about supercooled water in the future because there is still much to learn.

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Shark fin is banned in 12 U.S. states—but it's still on the menu
Shark finning is banned in the USA since the year 2000 which leaves us to wonder why it is still sold in 10/12 states in the USA. Shark finning is simply stripping the animal of its fins and throwing it back into the water to die.   If this continues then more species may become threatened or become extinct whether that be sharks or other animals because of sharks being the apex predator and keeping the balance of the ecosystem. Putting up the shark fin ban would just make the shark fin market “go underground” because of the demand and low penalties of shark finning.

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Quantum tunnelling pushes the boundaries of self powered sensors.

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Dark matter warps galaxy clusters more than expected, shaking up the cosmic theory.