Re-creating the sounds of an underground city #ASA188
Reports and Proceedings
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 9-Sep-2025 22:11 ET (10-Sep-2025 02:11 GMT/UTC)
Located in modern-day Turkey, the ancient underground city Derinkuyu spanned seven levels, with four main ventilation channels and over 50,000 other smaller shafts. Researcher Sezin Nas re-created its ancient soundscape, studying both the history of the city as well as its architecture. She analyzed three types of spaces — a church, a living area, and a kitchen — and considered the room functions, sources of sounds, and even reverberations when creating a 3D virtual soundscape that will eventually allow a listener to experience the sounds of the city.
Soliton microcombs face challenges from timing jitter, which limits their precision in applications like lidar and optical communications. To overcome this, researchers developed a dispersion-managed silicon nitride microresonator that suppresses avoided mode crossings. The device operates at an 89 GHz repetition rate and achieves femtosecond-level jitter, setting a new performance benchmark for chip-scale combs and enabling advances in space navigation, ultrafast data transfer, and quantum metrology.
The clean energy transition requires new means to transport energy that are less reliant on burning fossil fuels. This requires new materials to catalyze reactions to store and extract energy from chemical energy carriers without combustion. One promising set of materials to create these catalysts is metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), molecular structures made of metal ions and organic linkers.
Scientists and engineers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) and the Department of Chemistry have developed a new computational tool that predicts which MOFs will be most stable for a given need.
When pollinators visit flowers, they produce various sounds, from wing flapping during hovering, to landing and takeoff. Francesca Barbero studied these vibroacoustic signals to develop noninvasive and efficient methods for monitoring pollinator communities and their influences on plant biology and ecology. The researchers found that the bee sounds led the snapdragons to increase their sugar and nectar volume, and even alter their gene expression that governs sugar transport and nectar production.
Researchers have detailed the physics behind a phenomenon that allows them to create spin in liquid droplets using ultrasound waves, which concentrates solid particles suspended in the liquid. The discovery will allow researchers to engineer technologies that make use of the technique to develop applications in fields such as biomedical testing and drug development.