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Jul 21, 2022

July 1957: Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer submit their paper, “Theory of Superconductivity”

Posted by in categories: materials, physics

Bardeen, Cooper and Schrieffer (left to right)

In 1911, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, in his quest to study materials at ever lower temperatures, happened to find that the electrical resistance of some metallic materials suddenly vanished at temperatures near absolute zero. He called the phenomenon superconductivity, and scientists soon found additional materials that exhibited this property.

But no one could completely explain how it worked. For the next few decades, many prominent physicists worked to develop a theory of the mechanism underlying superconductivity, but no one had much success, and some despaired of figuring it out. One such physicist, Felix Bloch, was quoted as proposing “Bloch’s theorem: Superconductivity is impossible.”

Jul 21, 2022

Air-gapped systems leak data via SATA cable WiFi antennas

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, security

An Israeli security researcher has demonstrated a novel attack against air-gapped systems by leveraging the SATA cables inside computers as a wireless antenna to emanate data via radio signals.

Jul 21, 2022

The Advanced Materials That Can Help Take Us to Mars

Posted by in categories: materials, space travel

Scientists, designers and engineers across the space industry are working tirelessly to form innovative solutions for traveling to, living on and further understanding Mars.


Mars has long occupied our imagination as a site of wonder and possibility in film — from the high-tech invasion portrayed in The War of the Worlds to Andy Weir’s perhaps more accurate depiction The Martian.

Today, reality is closer than ever to the dreams of science fiction. As early as the 2030s, humans will be able to visit Earth’s planetary neighbor in the most ambitious aerospace mission yet.

Continue reading “The Advanced Materials That Can Help Take Us to Mars” »

Jul 21, 2022

Tesla Gets Dedicated Lane At US-Mexico Border Crossing

Posted by in category: futurism

The lane, which goes from Nuevo León, Mexico, into Texas, is only to be used by Tesla and its suppliers.

Jul 21, 2022

Deep learning methods for designing proteins scaffolding functional sites

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, space

Current approaches to de novo design of proteins harboring a desired binding or catalytic motif require pre-specification of an overall fold or secondary structure composition, and hence considerable trial and error can be required to identify protein structures capable of scaffolding an arbitrary functional site. Here we describe two complementary approaches to the general functional site design problem that employ the RosettaFold and AlphaFold neural networks which map input sequences to predicted structures. In the first “constrained hallucination” approach, we carry out gradient descent in sequence space to optimize a loss function which simultaneously rewards recapitulation of the desired functional site and the ideality of the surrounding scaffold, supplemented with problem-specific interaction terms, to design candidate immunogens presenting epitopes recognized by neutralizing antibodies, receptor traps for escape-resistant viral inhibition, metalloproteins and enzymes, and target binding proteins with designed interfaces expanding around known binding motifs. In the second “missing information recovery” approach, we start from the desired functional site and jointly fill in the missing sequence and structure information needed to complete the protein in a single forward pass through an updated RoseTTAFold trained to recover sequence from structure in addition to structure from sequence. We show that the two approaches have considerable synergy, and AlphaFold2 structure prediction calculations suggest that the approaches can accurately generate proteins containing a very wide array of functional sites.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Jul 21, 2022

Researchers develop antiviral face mask that can capture, deactivate SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on contact

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, materials

A team of University of Kentucky researchers led by College of Engineering Professor Dibakar Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., and his Ph.D. student, Rollie Mills, have developed a medical face mask membrane that can capture and deactivate the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein on contact.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Bhattacharyya, known to friends and colleagues as “DB,” along with collaborators across disciplines at UK set out to create the material. Their work was published in Communications Materials on May 24.

SARS-CoV-2 is covered in spike proteins, which allow the virus to enter host cells once in the body. The team developed a membrane that includes that attach to the protein spikes and deactivates them.

Jul 21, 2022

Have researchers found the best semiconductor of them all?

Posted by in categories: computing, solar power, sustainability

Silicon is one of the most abundant elements on Earth, and in its pure form the material has become the foundation of much of modern technology, from solar cells to computer chips. But silicon’s properties as a semiconductor are far from ideal.

For one thing, although silicon lets electrons whizz through its structure easily, it is much less accommodating to “holes”—electrons’ positively charged counterparts—and harnessing both is important for some kinds of chips. What’s more, silicon is not very good at conducting heat, which is why overheating issues and expensive cooling systems are common in computers.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT, the University of Houston, and other institutions has carried out experiments showing that a material known as cubic arsenide overcomes both of these limitations. It provides to both electrons and holes, and has excellent thermal conductivity. It is, the researchers say, the best semiconductor material ever found, and maybe the best possible one.

Jul 21, 2022

When Light and Electrons Spin Together: Advancing Toward Petahertz Electronics Based on Quantum Materials

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

Theoretical physicists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin influences the emission of light on the ultrafast timescale.

Electrons, which are present in all kinds of matter, are charged particles and therefore react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, electrons experience a force, called the Lorentz force, that drives them and induces some exquisite dynamics reflecting the properties of the material. This, in turn, results in the emission of light by the electrons at various wavelengths, a well-known phenomenon called high-harmonic generation.

Exactly how the electrons move under the influence of the light field depends on a complex mixture of properties of the solid, including its symmetries, topology, and band structure, as well as the nature of the light pulse. Additionally, electrons are like spinning tops. They have a propensity to rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise, a property called the “spin” of the electrons in quantum mechanics.

Jul 21, 2022

Micrometeoroid Damage To James Webb Telescope Can’t Be Fixed

Posted by in category: space

The widely celebrated James Webb Space Telescope has received damage to one of its mirrors from a micrometeoroid, but NASA says not to worry. — Videos from The Weather Channel | weather.com

Jul 21, 2022

Biologists train AI to generate medicines and vaccines

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Scientists have developed artificial intelligence software that can create proteins that may be useful as vaccines, cancer treatments, or even tools for pulling carbon pollution out of the air.

This research, reported today in the journal Science, was led by the University of Washington School of Medicine and Harvard University. The article is titled “Scaffolding functional sites using deep learning.”

“The proteins we find in nature are amazing molecules, but designed proteins can do so much more,” said senior author David Baker, an HHMI Investigator and professor of biochemistry at UW Medicine. “In this work, we show that machine learning can be used to design proteins with a wide variety of functions.”