Lifeboat Foundation

The acetate would then be used to feed plants that are grown hydroponically. The method could also be used to grow other food-producing organisms, since acetate is naturally used by mushrooms, yeast, and algae.

“The whole point of this new process to try to boost the efficiency of photosynthesis,” says senior author Feng Jiao, an electrochemist at Washington University in St. Louis. “Right now, we are at about 4% efficiency, which is already four times higher than for photosynthesis, and because everything is more efficient with this method, the CO₂ footprint associated with the production of food becomes much smaller.”

To genetically engineer acetate-eating plants, the researchers are taking advantage of a metabolic pathway that germinating plants use to break down food stored in their seeds. This pathway is switched off once plants become capable of photosynthesis, but switching it back on would enable them to use acetate as a source of energy and carbon.

A team of engineers and physicists affiliated with a host of institutions across Japan, working at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, has demonstrated acceleration of positive muons from thermal energy to 100 keV—the first time muons have been accelerated in a stable way. The group has published a paper describing their work on the arXiv preprint server.

The consumer-facing side of electric vehicles paints a limited picture of what’s happening in the broader automotive industry. But when you glance behind the scenes, things start appearing far clearer, to a point where it’s pretty evident that the future of road transport is battery-powered. A big part of what’s happening backstage is making those batteries right here, on American soil.

Korean battery maker LG Energy Solution announced recently that it reached an agreement with Ford to move production of the Ford Mustang Mach-E’s batteries from Poland to Michigan starting next year. Instead, the LGES Poland factory will prioritize producing batteries for Ford’s commercial vans sold in the U.K. and the European Union.

Here we propose a novel protected erasure qubit, the Floquet fluxonium molecule (FFM). The FFM qubit exhibits (i) extremely long predicted logical coherence times and relatively long erasure lifetimes, (ii) a simple superconducting circuit structure, and (iii) high-fidelity single-qubit gates, which are much faster than the coherence timescale. Based on a Floquet-driven pair of inductively coupled fluxonium circuits [13–15], the FFM is a multi-DOF superconducting circuit with engineered, highly coherent quasieigenstates.

Our key technical contribution is a novel form of Floquet protection in a multi-DOF qubit, which strongly suppresses phase-flip errors, removing them at first and second order in the flux noise. The combination of drive and multi-DOF allows the low-lying eigenstates to be disjoint and delocalized with a nonvanishing energy gap. The second-order sweet spot has no analogue in the single-DOF circuits that have been studied thus far [16–18]; in fact, in single-DOF circuits there is a generic trade-off between bit-and phase-flip errors arising from the inability to keep two eigenstates simultaneously disjoint and flux delocalized using accessible circuit QED Hamiltonians [19].

The higher-order phase-flip insensitivity allow the predicted coherence time of the FFM qubit to significantly outperform other multi-DOF circuits. These include the following: the dual-rail erasure transmon, with experimentally achieved logical lifetimes of approximately ms and erasure lifetimes of approximately [12]; the dual-rail cavity, with logical lifetimes predicted [10] (achieved [11]) at approximately ms (3 ms), limited by cavity and ancilla dephasing, and erasure lifetimes of approximately in both cases; and the cold echo qubit, with predicted logical lifetime of ms with erasure rates unreported [8]. Theoretically, we find the FFM exhibits long bit-flip coherence times of approximately 50 ms while suppressing phase flips even further, along with a 500-erasure lifetime.

Gridstor, a US-based developer and operator of grid-scale battery storage systems, has kicked off construction of its first project in the Texas ERCOT market.

The developer said last week (17 October) that construction is underway on the Hidden Lakes Reliability Project 220MW/440MWh standalone battery energy storage system (BESS) in Texas’ Galveston County.

In a major jump into the era of eVTOL air taxis and multicopter cargo drones, the US FAA has issued new regulations that introduce the first new aircraft category, called “power-lift” aircraft, since modern helicopters were introduced in the 1940s.

According to the FAA and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a power-lift aircraft is “a heavier-than-air aircraft capable of vertical take-off, vertical landing, and low-speed flight, which depends principally on engine-driven lift devices or engine thrust for the lift during these flight regimes and on non-rotating aerofoils for lift during horizontal flight.”

Essentially, this means aircraft that combine the characteristics of both fixed-wing planes and helicopters. In other words, they can take off, hover, and land like helicopters, yet act like fixed-winged craft in horizontal flight. As of now, these include convertiplanes, tilt-rotors, tilt-wings, rotor-wings, tail-sitters, and VSTOL aircraft like the Harrier and the F-35B Lighting II that use vector thrust, lift jets, or lift fans for vertical flight.

Deposits of ice in lunar dust and rock (regolith) are more extensive than previously thought, according to a new analysis of data from NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission. Ice would be a valuable resource for future lunar expeditions. Water could be used for radiation protection and supporting human explorers, or broken into its hydrogen and oxygen components to make rocket fuel, energy, and breathable air.

Prior studies found signs of ice in the larger permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) near the lunar South Pole, including areas within Cabeus, Haworth, Shoemaker and Faustini craters. In the new work, “We find that there is widespread evidence of water ice within PSRs outside the South Pole, towards at least 77 degrees south latitude,” said Dr. Timothy P. McClanahan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of a paper on this research published October 2 in The Planetary Science Journal.

The study further aids lunar mission planners by providing maps and identifying the surface characteristics that show where ice is likely and less likely to be found, with evidence for why that should be. “Our model and analysis show that greatest ice concentrations are expected to occur near the PSRs’ coldest locations below 75 Kelvin (−198°C or −325°F) and near the base of the PSRs’ poleward-facing slopes,” said McClanahan.

Researchers at McGill University have made a significant advance in the development of all-solid-state lithium batteries, which are being pursued as the next step in electric vehicle (EV) battery technology.

By addressing a long-standing issue with battery performance, this innovation could pave the way for safer, longer-lasting EVs. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

The challenge lies in the resistance that occurs where the ceramic electrolyte meets the electrodes. This makes the battery less efficient and reduces how much energy it can deliver. The research team has discovered that creating a porous ceramic membrane, instead of the traditional dense plate, and filling it with a small amount of polymer can resolve this issue.

Demystifying the science of quantum physics.