Welcome to The Week of Technology. This week you'll see: precious images of deep-sea mysteries; probes "touching" the sun; seeing how small machines evolve in virtual worlds; windows and roofs helping rooms warm in winter and cool in summer; and new, environmentally friendly sequins.
Transparent fish head
A green "light bulb" on a transparent head? The mysterious creature is called macropinna microstoma (also known as the Pacific barrel-eye fish), and scientists recently photographed it in the deep sea.
Precious videos of the big finned posterior fish flow out of the | MBARI
The large-finned posterior fish looks strange, covered with scales, but the head is filled with transparent liquid, and the green lens of the eye can be seen in it. Its eyes can not only see ahead, but also rotate upwards, seeing the outline of the object above. The fish lives in the North Pacific at depths of 600 to 800 meters, in near darkness, and often remains motionless.
At present, little is known about this deep-sea fish | MBARI
The large-finned fish was discovered in 1939, but little is known about it and its number is unknown. Due to the destruction during the capture process, no complete individuals of this fish have been caught so far. In 2004, the first picture of a large-finned fish was taken. Scientists at the Montreal Bay Institute in California used remote-controlled instruments to monitor them, and finally filmed their first video in 2009 and speculated about their feeding habits. Recently, in the same area, the team finally caught the fish again at a depth of 650 meters.
Touch the sun
For the first time, humans have "touched" the scorching sun with the help of a flying machine — to be precise, the sun's coronal layer, the outermost layer of the sun's atmosphere.
Parker Solar Probe (Art Concept) | NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
The history that made this history was the Parker Solar Probe. A study officially published this week confirmed that it entered the sun's coronal layer for the first time during a flyby in April this year[2]. Researcher Nour Raouafi said: "We saw evidence of its presence in the corona from magnetic fields, solar wind data and images. In fact, we can see the aircraft fly past the corona structures that we can see from a total solar eclipse. ”[3]
As it penetrated the coronal layer, the Parker Solar Probe flew past the |, a structure known as coronal streamers NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory
In the future, the Parker probe will continue to approach the sun in its orbital flight, eventually reaching a position of only 6.2 million kilometers from the sun's surface in 2025. Getting up close and personal with solar energy has helped scientists solve many mysteries, such as how the solar wind forms and why the outermost coronal layer is so hot.
Virtual playground
Fun video of the week: Watch how weird "little robots" run, climb, roll over, and throw boxes.
WITH CSAIL
These small blocks of small robots exist in a virtual platform, and they are composed of four different basic parts: black is a hard block, gray is a soft block, and orange and blue are "brakes" that can retract and move in different directions. The body structure and movement patterns of these little guys are generated by algorithms, and in the virtual system, different robot designs are constantly scored and screened, and only those who perform best in completing the task will be left.
Recently, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated a system called the Evolution Gym, which optimizes robot designs with ideas similar to natural selection to get the best solutions to specific tasks.[4] The "Evolution Gym" is open source, and researchers hope it will become a universal platform for more researchers to test their algorithms, eventually get smarter robot designs, and bring the optimal designs screened into real life.
Warm in winter and cool in summer
In this week's Science, two studies showed window and roof coatings that were "warm in winter and cool in summer" [5,6]. These new materials can automatically switch between "cooling" and "keeping warm" modes with temperature changes, and can help the house maintain a comfortable temperature without expending additional energy.
Window glass samples of "warm in winter and cool in summer" | NTU Singapore
When ambient temperatures are high, these window and roof coatings can help cool down the room through radiant cooling, and when the temperature is low to a certain extent, they can automatically turn off the "cooling mode" to avoid heat loss. In both studies, the secret to this switch was vanadium dioxide, which is doped with tungsten, a material that can switch between two states with different thermal radiation properties depending on temperature changes.
Research calculations show that this automatically switching temperature regulation technology can reduce the energy consumption required to maintain the temperature of the room throughout the year.
Eco-friendly sequins
Sequins decorate people's lives, but it also brings the problem of microplastic pollution. Now, researchers have created an eco-friendly sequin: it's made from plant-derived materials that are degradable and shiny just like plastic sequins.[7]
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
These eco-friendly sequins are thin-film materials made up of cellulose nanocrystals. The researchers coated and dried the cellulose nanocrystal suspension to make a thin film, and during the drying process, these nanocrystals were arranged in an orderly manner to form different structural colors. This time, the researchers expanded the production of cellulose structural color films, successfully producing a one-meter-long color film.
These colored sequins made of cellulose can also be stabilized when dispersed in water, and they are expected to be used in handicrafts, cosmetics and other fields. In addition to reducing pollution, producing cellulose sequins also consumes less energy than plastic sequins. However, at present, this process is not yet able to achieve the production speed required for large-scale industrialization.
bibliography
[1] https://twitter.com/MBARI_News/status/1468991735854297092
[2] https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.255101
[3] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/937970
[4] https://news.mit.edu/2021/system-designing-training-intelligent-soft-robots-1207
[5] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0291
[6] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf7136
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-021-01135-8
Author: Mai Mai, window knocking rain
EDIT: Window knocking rain
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