Tag: Composites

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Axiogenesis by Alicia Sometimes

surplus baryons >
    antibaryons. Whirling
             QCD axions

I was fascinated by the etymology of this word. In Greek ‘axía’ (worth, value, merit) and ‘génesis’ (production, creation, formation, origination). Here, axiogenesis is a mechanism in which the cosmological excess of baryons (a type of composite subatomic particle) over antibaryons is generated from the rotation of the QCD axion.

Raymond T. Co & Keisuke Harigaya (2020) outline how Axions Could Explain Baryon Asymmetry – the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.111602

Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing, Best Australian Poems and more. She is director and co-writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. She is currently a Science Gallery Melbourne ‘Leonardo’ (creative advisor). Her TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about the passion of combining art with science. You can catch up with her on Twitter @aliciasometimes and at her website www.aliciasometimes.com

Enjoyed Alicia’s sciku? Check out her earlier poems ‘Antimatter’ and ‘The Born Rule‘.

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Closing the trap by Dr Hortense Le Ferrand

A feather falling –

hungry inert soul wakes up,

snaps, closing the trap.

The Venus flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is a carnivorous plant that performs one of the fastest movements in the flora: when an insects touches the hairs inside the leaves of the trap, it closes in a few milliseconds.

Inspired by the plants and its internal microstructure, a team of researchers from ETH Zürich and Purdue University have developed a composite material mimicking the Venus leaf and able to change shape as fast as the plant (Schmied & Le Ferrand et al, 2017).

Thanks to the good match between the theoretical simulations and the experimental results, their method opens new avenues for the creation of autonomous and fast robotic devices.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/aa5efd

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand is a postdoctoral fellow at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore. Hortense’s interests are on the fabrication and design of novel materials and systems inspired by nature. Check out her other scku ‘Shrimp molting’ here.