Lifeboat Foundation

It turns out there’s a lot of scrap wood produced by the US Army. According to the US Army Corps of Engineers, more than 80 percent of solid waste produced at the Department of Defense (DoD) forward operating bases consists of scrap wood, cardboard, and paper. This equates to almost 13 pounds of waste per soldier per day that could be reused if handled properly, reducing garbage and supplying useful materials for construction.

DARPA’s new Waste Upcycling for Defense (WUD) program aims to produce a process for turning scrap wood, cardboard, and paper into lightweight, strong, and sustainable materials for reuse in a variety of DoD environments.

Scaling has long been recognized as a major hurdle for quantum processors, along with a need for advances in quantum error correction and the control of quantum gates.

However, while rapid progress has been made in the latter two, far less progress has been made in the development of a CMOS-based scalable system, where the devices and qubits are sufficiently identical that the number of external control signals increases slowly with the number of qubits.

Therefore the development, and taping-out, of a CMOS-based scaling architecture has taken on new significance, as scaling has become the most critical remaining task for building a commercially viable quantum computer.

We compare the performance of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) with state-of-the-art classical solvers Gurobi and MQLib to solve the MaxCut problem on 3-regular graphs. We identify the minimum noiseless sampling frequency and depth p required for a quantum device to outperform classical algorithms. There is potential for quantum advantage on hundreds of qubits and moderate depth with a sampling frequency of 10 kHz. We observe, however, that classical heuristic solvers are capable of producing high-quality approximate solutions in linear time complexity. In order to match this quality for large graph sizes N, a quantum device must support depth p > 11. Additionally, multi-shot QAOA is not efficient on large graphs, indicating that QAOA p ≤ 11 does not scale with N. These results limit achieving quantum advantage for QAOA MaxCut on 3-regular graphs.

At the annual APS Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics meeting, physicists made the case for a new way of modeling a universe.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are now widely used. For use in displays, blue OLEDs are additionally required to supplement the primary colors red and green. Especially in blue OLEDs, impurities give rise to strong electrical losses, which could be partly circumvented by using highly complex and expensive device layouts. A team from the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research has now developed a new material concept that potentially allows efficient blue OLEDs with a strongly simplified structure.

From televisions to smartphones: organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are nowadays finding their way into many devices that we use every day. To display an image, they are needed in the three primary colors red, green and blue. In particular, light-emitting diodes for blue light are still difficult to manufacture because blue light—physically spoken—has a high energy, which makes the development of materials difficult.

Especially the presence of minute quantities of impurities in the material that cannot be removed plays a decisive role in the performance of these materials. These impurities— oxygen molecules, for example—form obstacles for electrons to move inside the diode and participate in the light-generation process. When an electron is captured by such an obstacle, its energy is not converted into light but into heat. This problem, known as “charge trapping”, occurs primarily in blue OLEDs and significantly reduces their efficiency.

With 147 fused benzene rings and 920 conjugated atoms, the nanoribbon shows optoelectronic properties that could compete with quantum dots.

How can we increase our lifespan by over two decades?

In this video, we dive into a comprehensive study involving over 700,000 U.S. veterans that reveals the immense power of eight healthy lifestyle habits.

Continue reading “Adding Decades to Your Life: The Power of Eight Healthy Habits — Neuroscience News” »

Summary: Religious groups may find their credibility and financial support undermined with the growing use of AI and robot preachers, according to researchers.

The study involved experiments with the Mindar humanoid robot in Japan and Pepper in Singapore, both delivering sermons to audiences. Participants rated these robotic preachers as less credible than their human counterparts, contributing to decreased donations.

Despite some acceptance, the study highlights the importance of human connection and credibility in religious leadership.

South Korean scientists have announced the development of a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor. If the claim is verified, this will change the world. Superconductors transmit electricity without resistance and have a series of magnetic properties that make them invaluable in technological applications. Usually, superconductors need to be cooled down to very low temperatures. A superconductor capable of working outside the lab in regular conditions would be revolutionary.

However, the conditional clauses in the first paragraph are necessary. There have been previous claims of room-temperature superconductivity that have not panned out. The researchers uploaded a paper to arXiv, and it is unclear if it was submitted for peer review to a journal. IFLScience has emailed them to learn more about the research and the new material, which is called modified lead-apatite or LK-99.

One crucial aspect of superconductivity is critical temperature, the temperature below which the material becomes superconductive. The value stated for LK-99 is 127°C (261°F), meaning it could easily be employed in all environments on Earth. If this is confirmed, it would not be the only room-temperature superconductor. But it would be the first to not require enormous pressures to work.