Daily Archives: January 29, 2024

Turning glass into a ‘transparent’ light-energy harvester

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What happens when you expose tellurite glass to femtosecond laser light? That’s the question that Gözden Torun at the Galatea Lab at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in collaboration with Tokyo Tech scientists, aimed to answer in her thesis work when she made the discovery that may one day turn windows into single material light-harvesting and sensing devices. The results are published in Physical Review Applied.

Interested in how the atoms in the tellurite would reorganize when exposed to fast pulses of high energy femtosecond laser light, the scientists stumbled upon the formation of nanoscale tellurium and tellurium oxide crystals, both etched into the glass, precisely where the glass had been exposed. That was the eureka moment for the scientists, since a semiconducting material exposed to daylight may lead to the generation of electricity.

“Tellurium being semiconducting, based on this finding we wondered if it would be possible to write durable patterns on the tellurite glass surface that could reliably induce electricity when exposed to light, and the answer is yes,” explains Yves Bellouard who runs EPFL’s Galatea Laboratory. “An interesting twist to the technique is that no additional materials are needed in the process. All you need is tellurite glass and a femtosecond laser to make an active photoconductive material.”

Using tellurite glass produced by colleagues at Tokyo Tech, the EPFL team brought their expertise in technology to modify the glass and analyze the effect of the laser. After exposing a simple line pattern on the surface of a tellurite glass 1 cm in diameter, Torun found that it could generate a current when exposing it to UV light and the , and this, reliably for months.

“It’s fantastic, we’re locally turning glass into a semiconductor using light,” says Yves Bellouard. “We’re essentially transforming materials into something else, perhaps approaching the dream of the alchemist.”

More information: Gözden Torun et al, Femtosecond-laser direct-write photoconductive patterns on tellurite glass, Physical Review Applied (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.21.014008

Source: Turning glass into a ‘transparent’ light-energy harvester

US states had 65,000 rape-related pregnancies after banning abortion

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Since the US Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion, estimates suggest that there have been tens of thousands of pregnancies as a result of rape in states with near-total abortion bans. Very few, if any, of those pregnancies were ended by a legal in-state abortion, even if states had exceptions for rape

[…]

To understand how this affects survivors of rape, Samuel Dickman at reproductive health non-profit Planned Parenthood of Montana and his colleagues estimated rape-related pregnancies in these states between July 2022 and January 2024.

The researchers first looked at the most recent data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on rape incidents, which was collected between 2016 and 2017. From that, they could approximate the proportion of rapes that resulted in pregnancy nationwide each year.

They then used data from law enforcement to estimate the number of rape-related pregnancies in each state since abortion bans were enacted. The result suggests that almost 65,000 people became pregnant as a result of rape in the 14 states. More than 90 per cent of those individuals lived in states where there weren’t exceptions that allow for an abortion in the case of rape.

Even in states with exceptions, fewer than a dozen legal abortions are being performed each month. One reason for this is that these states no longer have abortion providers, says Dickman. Plus, “most of the states with rape exceptions require some amount of reporting to law enforcement”, he says. “That’s a decision many survivors of rape choose not to do.”

Most sexual assaults go unreported due to stigma and fear of retaliation. That is also why these findings are most likely to be an underestimate, says Dickman.

[…]

 

Source: US states had 65,000 rape-related pregnancies after banning abortion | New Scientist

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain which will never be used in root zone DNS

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.

The proposed TLD is .INTERNAL and, as the name implies, it’s intended for internal use only. The idea is that .INTERNAL could take on the same role as the 192.168.x.x IPv4 bloc – available for internal use but never plumbed into DNS or other infrastructure that would enable it to be accessed from the open internet.

[…]

A consultation process produced 35 candidate strings, each of which was checked to ensure it wasn’t already a TLD, and for “potential for confusing similarity, for length, and for its capacity to be memorable and meaningful.” Assessments were conducted for all six United Nations languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. That process saw many candidates “deemed unsuitable due to their lack of meaningfulness.”

For example, .DOMAIN was binned because it was felt not to “convey that its purpose is specifically for private-use applications.”

After years of debate, ICANN and other internet governance orgs were left with two viable candidates: .PRIVATE and .INTERNAL.

Last Thursday, ICANN announced [PDF] that .INTERNAL was its choice.

.PRIVATE lost out because assessors felt it “may carry the unintended imputation of privacy to a higher degree, and more potential was seen for conflicting meanings across the gamut of assessed languages.”

ICANN’s board still has to sign off the creation of .INTERNAL.

[…]

Source: ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain • The Register

Well, this is a tld I know a lot of businesses have been using for decades, so it’s nice that ICANN is finally on to it. Good thing those people there are earning their money!