Flying insects have evolved sophisticated sensory-motor systems, and here we argue that such systems are used to keep upright against intrinsic flight instabilities. We describe a theory that predicts the instability growth rate in body pitch from flapping-wing aerodynamics and reveals two ways of achieving balanced flight: active control with sufficiently rapid reactions and passive stabilization with high body drag.

Hierarchical porous polymer materials are of increasing importance because of their potential application in catalysis, separation technology, or bioengineering. Examples for their synthesis exist, but there is a need for a facile yet versatile conceptual approach to such hierarchical scaffolds and quantitative characterization of their nonperiodic pore systems.

The fabrication and testing of a prototype deep-depletion direct-conversion X-ray CCD detector are described. The device is fabricated on 600 μm-thick high-resistivity silicon, with 24 × 24 μm pixels in a 4k × 4k pixel format. Calibration measurements and the results of initial protein crystallography experiments at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) F1 beamline are described, as well as suggested improvements for future versions of the detector. © 2013 International Union of Crystallography Printed in Singapore - all rights reserved.

The Cooper pairing mechanism of heavy fermionsuperconductors, long thought to be due to spin fluctuations, has not yet been determined. It is the momentum space (k-space) structure of the superconducting energy gap Δ(k) that encodes specifics of this pairing mechanism. However, because the energy scales are so low, it has not been possible to directly measure Δ(k) for any heavy fermion superconductor.

Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), a layered semiconducting material in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), as thin as a monolayer (consisting of a hexagonal plane of Mo atoms covalently bonded and sandwiched between two planes of S atoms, in a trigonal prismatic structure), has demonstrated unique properties and strong promises for emerging two-dimensional (2D) nanodevices.

We have measured optical second-harmonic generation (SHG) from atomically thin samples of MoS2 and h-BN with one to five layers. We observe strong SHG from materials with odd layer thickness, for which a noncentrosymmetric structure is expected, while the centrosymmetric materials with even layer thickness do not yield appreciable SHG. SHG for materials with odd layer thickness was measured as a function of crystal orientation.

Bilayer graphene has been a subject of intense study in recent years. The interlayer registry between the layers can have dramatic effects on the electronic properties: for example, in the presence of a perpendicular electric field, a band gap appears in the electronic spectrum of so-called Bernal-stacked graphene [Oostinga JB, et al. (2007) Nature Materials 7:151-157]. This band gap is intimately tied to a structural spontaneous symmetry breaking in bilayer graphene, where one of the graphene layers shifts by an atomic spacing with respect to the other.

A semi-analytical study of the acoustic radiation losses associated with various transverse vibration modes of a micromechanical (MEMS) annular resonator is presented. The quality factor, Q, of such resonators is of interest in many applications and depends on structural geometry, fluid-structure interaction, and the device encapsulation. Resonators with at least one surface exposed to air can display significant losses through acoustic radiation even at μm dimensions.

Quantum confinement plays an important role in the optical properties of semiconductor quantum dots (QDs). In this work, we combine experiment and modeling to systematically investigate the size dependence of the degenerate two-photon absorption (TPA) of below-band-gap radiation in CdSe QDs. The TPA coefficient β at 800 nm of CdSe QDs of varying radii was measured using femtosecond white-light transient absorption spectroscopy by probing the pump-induced bleaching at the first exciton transition energy.