Neutrino Transmutation Observed For The First Time

December 18, 2025 by Tyler August 25 Comments

Once upon a time, transmutation of the elements was a really big deal. Alchemists drove their patrons near to bankruptcy chasing the philosopher’s stone to no avail, but at least we got chemistry out of it. Nowadays, anyone with a neutron source can do some spicy transmutation. Or, if you happen to have a twelve meter sphere of liquid scintillator two kilometers underground, you can just wait a few years and let neutrinos do it for you. That’s what apparently happened at SNO+, the experiment formally known as Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, as announced recently.

The scinillator already lights up when struck by neutrinos, much as the heavy water in the original SNO experiment did. It will also light up, with a different energy peak, if a nitrogen-13 atom happens to decay. Except there’s no nitrogen-13 in that tank — it has a half life of about 10 minutes. So whenever a the characteristic scintillation of a neutrino event is followed shortly by a N-13 decay flash, the logical conclusion is that some of the carbon-13 in the liquid scintillator has been transmuted to that particular isotope of nitrogen.

That’s not unexpected; it’s an interaction that’s accounted for in the models. We’ve just never seen it before, because, well. Neutrinos. They’re called “ghost particles” for a reason. Their interaction cross-section is absurdly low, so they are able to pass through matter completely unimpeded most of the time. That’s why the SNO was built 2 KM underground in Sudbury’s Creighton Mine: the neutrinos could reach it, but very few cosmic rays and no surface-level radiation can. “Most of the time” is key here, though: with enough liquid scintillator — SNO+ has 780 tonnes of the stuff — eventually you’re bound to have some collisions.

Capturing this interaction was made even more difficult considering that it requires C-13, not the regular C-12 that the vast majority of the carbon in the scintillator fluid is made of. The abundance of carbon-13 is about 1%, which should hold for the stuff in SNO+ as well since no effort was made to enrich the detector. It’s no wonder that this discovery has taken a few years since SNO+ started in 2022 to gain statistical significance.

The full paper is on ArXiv, if you care to take a gander. We’ve reported on SNO+ before, like when they used pure water to detect reactor neutrinos while they were waiting for the scintillator to be ready. As impressive as it may be, it’s worth noting that SNO is no longer the largest neutrino detector of its kind.

Molecular beam epitaxy system Veeco Gen II at the FZU – Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The system is designed for growth of monocrystalline semiconductors, semiconducting heterostructures, materials for spintronics and other compound material systems containing Al, Ga, As, P, Mn, Cu, Si and C.

Germanium Semiconductor Made Superconductor By Gallium Doping

December 17, 2025 by John Elliot V 12 Comments

Over on ScienceDaily we learn that an international team of scientists have turned a common semiconductor germanium into a superconductor.

Researchers have been able to make the semiconductor germanium superconductive for the first time by incorporating gallium into its crystal lattice through the process of molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). MBE is the same process which is used in the manufacture of semiconductor devices such as diodes and MOSFETs and it involves carefully growing crystal lattice in layers atop a substrate.

When the germanium is doped with gallium the crystalline structure, though weakened, is preserved. This allows for the structure to become superconducting when its temperature is reduced to 3.5 Kelvin. Read all about it in the team’s paper here (PDF).

It is of course wonderful that our material science capabilities continue to advance, but the breakthrough we’re really looking forward to is room-temperature superconductors, and we’re not there yet. If you’re interested in progress in superconductors you might like to read about Floquet Majorana Fermions which we covered earlier this year.

The Lethal Danger Of Combining Welding And Brake Cleaner

December 17, 2025 by Maya Posch 47 Comments

With the availability of increasingly cheaper equipment, welding has become far more accessible these days. While this is definitely a plus, it also comes with the elephant-sized asterisk that as with any tool you absolutely must take into account basic safety precautions for yourself and others. This extends to the way you prepare metal for welding, with [Dr. Bernard], AKA [ChubbyEmu] recently joining forces with [styropyro] to highlight the risks of cleaning metal with brake cleaner prior to welding.

Much like with common household chemicals used for cleaning, such as bleach and ammonia, improper use of these can produce e.g. chlorine gas, which while harmful is generally not lethal. Things get much more serious with brake cleaner, containing tetrachloroethylene. As explained in the video, getting brake cleaner on a rusty part to clean it and then exposing it to the intensive energies of the welding process suffices to create phosgene.

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Memory At The Speed Of Light

December 16, 2025 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Look inside a science fiction computer, and you’ll probably see tubes and cubes that emit light. Of course, it’s for effect, but the truth is, people do think light computing may be the final frontier of classical computing power. Engineers at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison are showing off a workable photonic latch — a memory element that uses light.

The device uses a commercial process (GlobalFoundries (GF) Fotonix Silicon Photonics platform) and, like a DRAM, regenerates periodically to prevent loss of the memory contents.

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Thorium-Metal Alloys And Radioactive Jet Engines

December 16, 2025 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

Although metal alloys is not among the most exciting topics for most people, the moment you add the word ‘radioactive’, it does tend to get their attention. So too with the once fairly common Mag-Thor alloys that combine magnesium with thorium, along with other elements, including zinc and aluminium. Its primary use is in aerospace engineering, as these alloys provide useful properties such as heat resistance, high strength and creep resistance that are very welcome in e.g. jet engines.

Most commonly found in the thorium-232 isotope form, there are no stable forms of this element. That said, Th-232 has a half-life of about 14 billion years, making it only very weakly radioactive. Like uranium-238 and uranium-235 it has the unique property of not having stable isotopes and yet still being abundantly around since the formation of the Earth. Thorium is about three times as abundant as uranium and thus rather hard to avoid contact with.

This raises the question of whether thorium alloys are such a big deal, and whether they justify removing something like historical artefacts from museums due to radiation risks, as has happened on a few occasions.

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Super-Sizing Insects And The Benefits Of Bones

December 12, 2025 by Maya Posch 24 Comments

One swol mealworm amidst its weaker brethren. (Credit: The Thought Emporium, YouTube)

Have you ever found yourself looking at the insects of the Paleozoic era, including the dragonfly Meganeuropsis permiana with its 71 cm wingspan and wondered what it would be like to have one as a pet? If so, you’re in luck because the mad lads over at [The Thought Emporium] have done a lot of the legwork already to grow your own raven-sized moths and more. As it turns out, all it takes is hijacking the chemical signals that control the development phases, to grow positively humongous mealworms and friends.

The growth process of the juveniles, such as mealworms – the larval form of the yellow mealworm beetle – goes through a number of molting stages (instars), with the insect juvenile hormone levels staying high until it is time for the final molt and transformation into a pupa from which the adult form emerges. The pyriproxyfen insecticide is a juvenile hormone analog that prevents this event. Although at high doses larvae perish, the video demonstrates that lower doses work to merely inhibit the final molt.

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Step Into My Particle Accelerator

December 11, 2025 by Al Williams 16 Comments

If you get a chance to visit a computer history museum and see some of the very old computers, you’ll think they took up a full room. But if you ask, you’ll often find that the power supply was in another room and the cooling system was in yet another. So when you get a computer that fit on, say, a large desk and maybe have a few tape drives all together in a normal-sized office, people thought of it as “small.” We’re seeing a similar evolution in particle accelerators, which, a new startup company says, can be room-sized according to a post by [Charles Q. Choi] over at IEEE Spectrum.

Usually, when you think of a particle accelerator, you think of a giant housing like the 3.2-kilometer-long SLAC accelerator. That’s because these machines use magnets to accelerate the particles, and just like a car needs a certain distance to get to a particular speed, you have to have room for the particle to accelerate to the desired velocity.

A relatively new technique, though, doesn’t use magnets. Instead, very powerful (but very short) laser pulses create plasma from gas. The plasma oscillates in the wake of the laser, accelerating electrons to relativistic speeds. These so-called wakefield accelerators can, in theory, produce very high-energy electrons and don’t need much space to do it.

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