Category: 7. Science

Senegal became the 56th nation to join the Artemis Accords on Thursday—and just the second country to join both the US-led coalition and a rival Chinese-led initiative to build a lunar research station.

“Senegal chooses to join the great human adventure that has always driven us to explore the unknown,” Maram Kairé, the director general of the Senegalese Agency for Space Studies, said at a ceremony at NASA HQ in DC. “This signature marks a meaningful step in our space diplomacy and in our ambition to contribute to the peaceful exploration of outer space.”  

A bit of history: The African nation established its space agency in March 2023, and launched its first satellite, an EO nanosat dubbed Gaindesat-1A, in August 2024. Senegal may not be a space power, but Kairé emphasized the critical role assets in orbit have in protecting the nation’s agriculture industry. 

“Space is not a luxury for us,” he said. “It is a tool of development.” 

Multiple choice: The global initiative to explore the Moon has largely split into two camps:

• The Artemis Accords, established in 2020 by the US and seven other founding nations,. The non-binding agreement sets best practices for responsible and transparent space exploration, and greenlights lunar resource extraction.
• The International Lunar Research Station, an initiative spearheaded by China to build a scientific station on the Moon’s south pole by 2035. The ILRS has more than a dozen members. 

US officials have previously made clear that all nations are welcome in the Artemis Accords, and that they are not asking countries to choose between the two groups. Still, only two nations have now made the decision to sign onto both frameworks.

Look back: Thailand became the first ILRS member to join the Artemis Accords in December. 

Set the scene: In the absence of the interim and deputy NASA administrators, Brian Hughes, NASA’s chief of staff, led the ceremony on the US side, joined by Jonathan Pratt, a State Department official leading the agency’s Bureau of African Affairs.

“As we welcome Senegal, we show the world that America leads with its friends,” Hughes said. “With this signature, Senegal tells the world it is committed to upholding these principles.”

New study findings are rewriting our knowledge of human biology and setting a new benchmark for precision medicine.

An international team of scientists has decoded some of the most stubborn, overlooked regions of the human genome using complete sequences from 65 individuals across diverse ancestries. The study, published online in Nature and co-led by The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) and UConn Health, reveals how hidden DNA variations that influence everything from digestion and immune response to muscle control-and could explain why certain diseases strike some populations harder than others.

This milestone builds on two foundational studies that reshaped the field of genomics. In 2022, researchers achieved the first-ever complete sequence of a single human genome, filling in major gaps left by the original Human Genome Project. In 2023, scientists released a draft pangenome constructed from 47 individuals-a critical step toward representing global genetic diversity. The new study significantly expands on both efforts, closing 92% of the remaining data gaps and mapping genomic variation across ancestries with a breadth and resolution never achieved.

“For too long, our genetic references have excluded much of the world’s population,” said Christine Beck, a geneticist at JAX and UConn Health at its UConn School of Medicine who co-led the work. “This work captures essential variation that helps explain why disease risk isn’t the same for everyone. Our genomes are not static, and neither is our understanding of them.”

By decoding DNA segments once thought too complex or variable to analyze, the study sets a new gold standard for genome sequencing and propels the field toward a more complete and inclusive vision of human biology. The findings clear a critical path for advancing precision medicine and ensuring that future discoveries benefit all populations-not just those historically overrepresented in research.

This work was conducted in collaboration with more than 20 institutions, including the University of Washington, the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heinrich Heine University, University of Pennsylvania, Clemson University, Yale University and the University of Colorado under the auspices of the Human Genome Structural Variation Consortium.

Hiding within our DNA

“It’s only been in the last three years that finally technology got to the point where we can sequence complete genomes,” said Charles Lee, the Robert Alvine Family Endowed Chair and a JAX geneticist who in 2004 discovered the widespread presence of structural DNA variation in people’s genomes. “Now, we’ve captured probably 95% or more of all these structural variants in each genome sequenced and analyzed. Having done this for not five, not 10, not 20-but 65 genomes-is an incredible feat.”

Scientists decode DNA by reading the order of its building blocks, called nucleotides, which act like letters in an instruction manual to direct all body functions. Current technologies can read most of that text but often miss or misread long, complex, and highly repetitive segments that span millions of letters that influence how genes work. These long stretches are called structural variants, and they can increase disease risk, protect the body, or offer no apparent effect at all.

Structural variants mainly arise when cells replicate and repair DNA, especially in sections with extremely long and repetitive sequences prone to errors. Unlike many other types of genetic variation, there are different types of structural variants, and they can span large regions of DNA. These structural variants include deletions, duplications, insertions, inversions, and translocations of genome segments. More complex variations, where large DNA chunks rearrange and fuse in unpredictable ways, were a primary focus of the new study.

Complex rearrangements of genomes can also drive evolutionary changes that shape our biology, like how the human brain became larger and more sophisticated over time. But mapping these changes contiguously is remarkably difficult because they scramble the genome in ways that defy decoding – like trying to make sense of pages from a book that’s been torn up, rearranged, and reassembled without seeing the original version.

Turning on the light

Until now, geneticists could only chart the “easiest” of structural variations in our DNA, leaving in the dark not only the most tangled, repetitive regions, but also their connection to rare genetic diseases. The new research has now broken that logjam, untangling 1,852 previously intractable complex structural variants and sharing an open-source playbook that any scientists sequencing genomes to this level can use in their laboratories.

Resolving these previously “hidden” regions across a wide range of ancestries turns areas that were once genetic blind spots into valuable sources of insight.

The work completely resolved the Y chromosome from 30 male genomes, shedding light on a chromosome that has been particularly challenging to resolve due to its highly repetitive sequences, and which was fully sequenced from telomere to telomere. In addition, the team fully resolved an intricate region of human genomes associated with the immune system called the Major Histocompatibility Complex, which is linked to cancer, autoimmune syndromes, and more than 100 other diseases.

The work also provides full sequences for the notoriously repetitive SMN1 and SMN2 region, the target of life-saving antisense therapies for spinal muscular atrophy, as well as a gene called NBPF8 involved in developmental and neurogenetic disease. The amylase gene cluster, which helps humans digest starchy foods according to a recent JAX study, was also fully sequenced.

The study additionally mapped transposable DNA elements in unprecedented detail, cataloguing 12,919 of these mobile element insertions across the 65 individuals. These elements, which can “jump” around the genome and change how genes work, accounted for almost 10% of all structural variants. In 1983, Barbara McClintock, a Hartford, Conn. native, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for her discovery of similar “jumping genes”, also known as transposable elements, in corn.

Some of these jumping genes in this study were even found in centromeres-regions of the chromosome that are essential for cell division and extremely difficult to sequence due to their repetitive DNA. Overall, the work accurately resolved and validated 1,246 human centromeres, shedding light on the extreme variability at their cores.

“With our health, anything that deals with susceptibility to diseases is a combination of what genes we have and the environment we’re interacting with,” Lee said. “If you don’t have your complete genetic information, how are you going to get a complete picture of your health and your susceptibility to disease?”

The work was made possible by genome sequencing techniques that combine highly accurate medium-length DNA reads with longer, lower-accuracy ones. The interpretation of variation in the genomes was driven by software from JAX that accurately catalogues variants between two human sequences. This software has now pushed forward to identifying structural variation within the most complex regions of human DNA.

“Just because we have a long, complete sequence doesn’t mean we actually know what’s in it. It’s like having a really good book, but there are still some pages we can’t read, and these tools are finally allowing us to interpret those missing parts of the genome,” said Peter Audano, a JAX computational biologist in the Beck lab.

“Now we can say, ‘Here’s a mutation, it starts here, ends there, and this is what it looks like.’ That’s a huge step forward. Now, scientists studying autism, rare diseases, and cancers will have the tools to see everything we’ve been missing for decades,” said Audano, who developed and implemented the variant-finding software.

Astronomers have found 11 unexpectedly cold hydrogen clouds hiding in the superheated turbulence of the Fermi Bubbles, in a discovery likened to finding ice cubes inside a volcano.

The Fermi Bubbles are two lobes of incredibly energetic gas that extend 25,000 light-years above and below the Milky Way’s disk, spanning a total height of 50,000 light-years.

These still-mysterious structures were revealed in 2010 by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, which gave them their name. They originated from an outburst of galactic proportions, likely from the Milky Way’s central black hole, and are moving at millions of miles per hour.

Related: Giant Bubbles Expanding From The Milky Way Could Be Explained by a Single Event

Now, using the unique capabilities of the US National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT), astronomers performed the deepest-ever radio survey of the Fermi Bubbles, twice as sensitive as previous surveys, and discovered 11 relatively cool, neutral hydrogen clouds embedded within these extreme environs.

The Milky Way harbors many violent environments and the Fermi Bubbles are among the most intense. The plasma here reaches a temperature around 1 million Kelvin (999,730 degrees Celsius), so it’s a surprise to spot hydrogen clouds that are at least 100 times cooler, or about 10,000 Kelvin.

In fact, seeing such relatively frigid hydrogen clouds within the Fermi Bubbles is akin to “finding ice cubes in a volcano,” explains Andrew Fox, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and study co-author.

The discovery provides an existential galactic conundrum: “We didn’t know that cold gas can survive in these extreme outflows. This challenges our understanding of how galaxies recycle and expel matter,” says Rongmon Bordoloi, astrophysicist at North Carolina State University and the study’s lead researcher.

The hydrogen clouds vary in mass and size. The 8 that have been more clearly resolved are up to 1,470 solar masses and range between 13 and 91 light-years in length. They’re also the highest latitude-hydrogen clouds yet discovered, about 13,000 light-years above the Milky Way’s center.

Given their structure and energetic surroundings, astronomers estimate that the hydrogen clouds may be several million years old. This matches an independent estimate of the age of the Fermi Bubbles themselves, challenging other formation models that suggest the bubbles could be as many as tens of millions of years in age.

“It wouldn’t be possible for the clouds to be present at all if the Fermi bubbles were 10 million years old or older,” explains Bordoloi.

Their extrapolated age suggests the hydrogen clouds were carried high into the Fermi Bubbles by the nuclear wind, or outflow from the Milky Way’s nucleus. This wind, which blasts out at hundreds of kilometers per second, is responsible for cycling mass and energy throughout a galaxy, circulating it from the galactic center to the galactic halo.

Jay Lockman, astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory and study co-author, clarifies the importance of the clouds in revealing the nuclear wind: “Just as you can’t see the motion of the wind on Earth unless there are clouds to track it, we can’t see the hot wind from the Milky Way but can detect radio emission from the cold clouds it carries along.”

As on Earth, these clouds are ephemeral, with a projected lifespan of up to 8 million years – a snap of the fingers on galactic timescales. In fact, they’ve already changed much, and may have been part of a larger cloud that was fragmented by the surrounding plasma. Conversely, the hydrogen clouds may have condensed from the surrounding plasma due to thermal instability.

Overall, this study has universal implications. Finding such cool hydrogen clouds within the chaos of the Fermi Bubbles isn’t just relevant to the Milky Way. It also helps improve models of galactic evolution, reshaping astronomers’ understanding of how matter and energy are cycled throughout galaxies across the cosmos.

This research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Around 850,000 years ago, a toddler was decapitated and cannibalized, cut marks on one of their neck bones suggest.

The bone, which belonged to an archaic human relative, was found at the Gran Dolina cave at the archaeological site of Atapuerca in northern Spain. An analysis of the bone indicates that the child was between 2 and 5 years old when they died.

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some spooky looking photos of our solar system’s newest interstellar invader on the run.

The object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, was first spotted careening through the outer limits of the Sun’s domain earlier this month, and appears to be a comet. Upon closer inspection, its speed was found to be so incredible that there could be no doubt of its extrasolar origins, making it only the third detected interstellar object in history.

Tantalizingly, it’s hurtling straight towards our system’s center, giving astronomers ample time to study this cosmic interloper which may have come from the center of our galaxy — and thus, may be older than our entire solar system.

And the Hubble just gave us a glimpse of what it looks like.

An amateur astronomer who goes by the handle astrafoxen on Bluesky edited the images together and uploaded them as two short little timelapses, giving us an idea of its blazing speed. Relative to the Sun, 3I/ATLAS clocked in at about 137,000 miles per hour when it was first spotted, and it’s only getting faster. The images within each set, it’s worth noting, were taken just minutes apart on Monday.

“Plenty of cosmic rays peppering the images, but the comet’s coma looks very nice and puffy,” astrafoxen wrote.

Before 3I/ATLAS, the only known interstellar objects were ‘Oumuamua, which was spotted in 2017 and famed for its cigar shape, and two years later Borisov, a comet that broke apart into massive chunks. Both have since veered back out into interstellar space.

Much of 3I/ATLAS’s fascinating nature remains uncertain, including how large it is. Being a suspected comet, it’s surrounded by a luminous halo of gas and dust called a coma, which shrouds the solid object at its center. The coma can form a tail hundreds of thousands of miles long.

Based on its speed and trajectory, though, 3I/ATLAS appears to have come from the galactic center, perhaps forming around another star before being booted out by a passing one. Some astronomers have speculated that ATLAS could be between three to 11 billion years old; it would need such a staggering timescale, they argue, to build up to the tremendous speed it’s now exhibiting.

The good news is that we caught sight of the comet pretty early on in its visit — ‘Oumuamua practically had one foot out the door when it was detected — and it’s still traveling towards the solar system’s center. It’s anticipated to reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, around October 30, at a distance of about 130 million miles. That buys us plenty of time to get a closer look at this thing and answer our most burning questions, including where in the Milky Way did it form — and, more luridly, whether it could possibly be an alien spacecraft.

More on space: Scientists Say That Uranus Appears to Have a Girlfriend

Deep below the surface of the ocean, unseen waves roil and churn the water. These internal waves, traveling between water layers of different temperatures and densities, draw cold, nutrient-rich water up from the depths and play a major role in oceanic circulation. Understanding and modeling their behavior is critical for developing more accurate simulations of an increasingly unpredictable climate. 

In a Nature Communications paper, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) math professor Yuri V. Lvov, Ph.D., and a team of oceanographers develop a first-of-its-kind model of internal wave dynamics that lays the foundation for new, more reliable models of ocean circulation. 

“Internal, wave-driven, vertical mixing is believed to be a main driver of oceanic circulation,” Lvov said. “It shapes the Earth’s climate by influencing sea level rise, nutrient fluxes, marine ecosystems, and anthropogenic heat and carbon uptake.” 

Lvov and the team built their model using wave-wave interaction theory, which describes how internal waves exchange energy and redistribute it when they interact. 

“The challenge for scientists has been to build an accurate and robust theory that describes these processes quantitatively and accurately,” Lvov said. “The ocean is just too big, and the internal waves operate on scales too small for today’s global models to accurately resolve.” 

Lvov and the team deployed a first-principles approach, parameterizing the physics of the process without the need for high-resolution numerical modeling. They interpreted turbulent mixing as the energy sink at the end of a downscale energy cascade through the oceanic internal wavefield, fueled by large-scale forcing and sustained by wave-wave interaction processes. 

“We found strong agreement between our first-principle quantifications and observational data, suggesting that we’ve captured the essential dynamics of wave-wave interactions and their contribution to turbulent mixing,” Lvov said. “Overall, we found that local interactions dominate inter-scale energy transfers, rather than scale-separated ones.” 

“The new theory offers a physically grounded alternative to existing empirical guesses,” Lvov added. 

“This publication by Dr. Lvov and his collaborators is an impressive accomplishment which opens new paths toward representing mixing in ocean circulation models, which are a crucial component of climate predictions,” said Peter R. Kramer, Ph.D., Department Head of Mathematical Sciences at RPI. “The effort to bring mathematical analysis to bear on a well-grounded physical model to explain and understand observational data in the real ocean exemplifies the interdisciplinary nature of the research in our department and the School of Science.” 

Lvov has been studying the theory of internal waves since joining RPI in 1999, and this paper represents the culmination of that work. “I’m especially thankful for the contributions of lead author Giovanni Dematteis, who was my postdoc during the research and writing of the paper, and the contributions of this entire team of talented and dedicated scientists,” Lvov said. 

About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Founded in 1824 for the application of science to the common purposes of life, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is the first technological research university in the United States. Today, it is recognized as a premier university, noted for its robust and holistic learning community that connects creativity with science and technology. RPI is dedicated to inventing for the future, from shaping the scientists, engineers, technologists, architects, financiers, managers, and entrepreneurs who will define what’s next for humanity, to research that bridges disciplines to solve the world’s toughest problems. Learn more at rpi.edu.

College Park, Md. — Researchers investigating atomic-scale phenomena impacting next-generation electronic and quantum devices have captured the first microscopy images of atomic thermal vibrations, revealing a new type of motion that could reshape the design of quantum technologies and ultrathin electronics.

Yichao Zhang , an assistant professor in the University of Maryland Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has developed an electron microscopy technique to directly image “moiré phasons”—a physical phenomenon that impacts superconductivity and heat conduction in two-dimensional materials for next-generation electronic and quantum devices. A paper about the research, which documents images of the thermal vibration of individual atoms for the first time, published July 24 in the journal Science .

Two-dimensional materials, which are sheet-like structures a few nanometers thick, are being explored as new components of next-generation quantum and electronic devices. A feature in twisted two-dimensional materials are “moiré phasons,” critical to understanding the materials’ thermal conductivity, electronic behavior, and structural order. Previously, moiré phasons were difficult to detect experimentally, preventing further understanding of the materials that could revolutionize quantum technologies and energy-efficient electronics.

Zhang’s research team took on this challenge by using a new technique called “electron ptychography,” which achieved the highest resolution documented (better than 15 picometer) and detected blurring of individual atoms caused by thermal vibrations. Her work has revealed that spatially localized moiré phasons dominate thermal vibrations of twisted two-dimensional materials, which fundamentally reshaped how scientists understand its impact.

The breakthrough study, which confirmed the longstanding theoretical predictions of moiré phasons, also demonstrated that “electron ptychography” can be used to map thermal vibrations with atomic precision for the first time—which was previously an experimental capability out of reach.

“This is like decoding a hidden language of atomic motion,” said Zhang. “Electron ptychography lets us see these subtle vibrations directly. Now we have a powerful new method to explore previously hidden physics, which will accelerate discoveries in two dimensional quantum materials.”

Zhang’s research team will next focus on resolving how thermal vibrations are affected by defects and interfaces in quantum and electronic materials. Controlling the thermal vibration behavior of these materials could enable the design of novel devices with tailored thermal, electronic, and optical properties—paving the way for advances in quantum computing, energy-efficient electronics, and nanoscale sensors.

WATCH THE VIDEO: Atom-by-Atom Imaging of Moiré Phasons with Electron Ptychography

Newswise — Twisted 2D material bilayers, consisting of two atom-thick layers on top of each other, can have different electrical and heat conducting properties when the layers are rotated. Using PSC’s flagship Bridges-2 system and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Delta in a dialog between computer simulation and microscopic imaging, a team from the University of Illinois reported today how, for the first time, they directly observed atomic vibrations stemming from the angle of the misalignment. This phenomenon can affect the thermal vibrational behavior of the atoms, and may be useful in designing new, more heat-resistant electronics.

Why It’s Important

If you’ve ever looked at a smartphone or computer screen through polarized sunglasses at just the right angle, the image completely blacks out. That’s because the light coming from a flat LCD screen is polarized. When the polarization angle of that light hits the polarization angle of the glasses just right, the light can’t get through.

Nature is full of instances where a simple twist can change the picture dramatically. One of these, whose behavior is even stranger than that polarity trick, is a set of substances called twisted 2D materials, or twisted bilayers. These are made by layering a sheet of atoms atop another, identical layer at an angle. For example, when sheets of tungsten diselenide (WSe2) are aligned perfectly, the atoms of each layer lie directly over one another. But when you twist them, even by a degree or so, you get a pattern of alignments, with some atoms in line and others displaced.

“Imagine you have a two-dimensional material like a layer of atoms,” said Elif Ertekin, Associate Professor of Mechanical Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois and a principal investigator in the study. “You take a second one and you [twist] it … You get this super-pattern forming. It’s called a moiré superlattice … you have regions where the atoms of both layers are right on top of each other … and then in the middle … you have regions where in the two layers the atoms are offset from each other … They’re kind of important.”

That pattern matters, because as the alignment of the atoms in each layer changes, those atoms’ vibrational energy can either build on or interfere with each other. They can form moiré phason modes, soft and squishy regions in the material that can help prevent the transport of heat. This makes these regions super-efficient at thermal insulation — preventing heat from moving through and out of the material. These properties make twisted bilayers and their phason modes promising both for a number of practical applications. These include creating new, more efficient heat protection for satellites and spacecraft, insulating windows in houses, and miniaturizing electronic components that won’t melt under the heat of their own operation.

Pinshane Huang, an Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois and the other principal investigator in the new study, wanted to use a new, ultra-precise microscopy technique called electron ptychography to image the moiré phasons in WSe2. Her goal was to learn exactly how atoms in the twisted bilayers vibrate as a result of thermal fluctuations arising from their interaction with the surrounding environment.

To understand these images more completely and to generate questions that could be answered by her measurements, she partnered with Elif Ertekin, associate professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois, and a specialist in molecular dynamics computer simulations of materials. Ertekin, whose lab has conducted many such simulations of promising materials, uses PSC’s flagship Bridges-2 supercomputer and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Delta system for the work. She obtained time on both systems through ACCESS, the National Science Foundation’s network of supercomputing resources.

How PSC Helped

Electron ptychography can image objects so small that individual atoms can be seen. Better, its resolution was at least in theory good enough that scientists could use it to measure atoms’ vibrations. In effect, it creates a time-lapse image showing the atoms’ movements.

“Mapping phasons in moiré superlattices requires exceptional spatial resolutions enabled by electron ptychography,” said first author Yichao Zhang, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland but then a post-doctoral researcher in Huang’s group. “This computation-aided microscopy technique relies on high-performance computing to achieve the resolution needed for thermal vibration mapping. Thanks to the computational power of NCSA Delta, we drastically reduced reconstruction times and accelerated optimization of reconstruction parameters. Comparison with simulations validated our experimental observation. This allows us to map thermal vibrations atom by atom, which is a breakthrough that wouldn’t have been possible without such advanced resources.”

Zhang used the Delta supercomputer to reconstruct atomic images from data from the electron microscope. To understand the movements, they would need to know what telltale signs to look for in the time-lapse. Here previous theoretical research would be their guide, in combination with simulations of the atoms’ behavior in Bridges-2.

Bridges-2 is Ertekin’s go-to for such molecular dynamics work. The system combines three strengths to support a variety of simulations that her lab conducts.For crunching the complex equations governing atomic vibrations, Bridges-2 offers 1,008 parallel regular memory, or RM, central processing units (CPUs). These allow difficult computations to be broken up into little pieces that can rapidly be processed at the same time.

Some calculations require the computer to remember large molecular structures and data. To make it unnecessary for the computer to make many time-consuming trips between storage and processors, Bridges-2 offers RAM memories of 246 or 512 megabytes in its RM nodes. In addition, it has a monster 4,000 MB of RAM in four extreme memory nodes.

Finally, Bridges-2 has 360 high-powered graphics processing units (GPUs). These offer acceleration in processing images and other calculations that naturally separate into many, many parallel tasks.

“We rely on Bridges-2 a lot for the work in our group,” Ertekin said. “We do all sorts of atomistic simulations, sometimes at the quantum level of theory and sometimes classical. In this work we used classical molecular dynamics simulations, which show the time dynamics of atoms vibrating. So using Bridges to help us integrate equations of motion, to tell us microscopically about the way that materials behave, and why they behave the way that they behave more or less directly from solving fundamental equations … And it would be really hard to do the things we do without Bridges.”

Thanks to the dialog between Bridges-2’s simulations and the microscope’s images, Huang and Ertekin were able to show for the first time how, when the two layers were twisted by small angles, phason patterns dominate the thermal vibration patterns of the atoms. In the other parts of the material, the atoms vibrate randomly. In the phason areas, they vibrate only in the direction of the pattern.

This phenomenon had been predicted by theory but never before seen directly. This was because the computations needed to resolve the atomic vibrations at a resolution of less than 15 picometers. That’s about a billionth of an inch, which was impossible to achieve before the current work.

The result also shows why these materials are so good at thermal insulation and offers an important clue to how such materials will behave in future electronic devices.

The team reported their results in an article in the prestigious journal Science today. Their results demonstrate that electron ptychography is a powerful method for directly measuring the behavior of materials at the tiniest scales, allowing scientists for the first time to see the vibrations of atoms and study how they govern materials’ behaviors.