Lifeboat Foundation

As our Energy Central Community thrives and grows with each passing year, it’s clear to us that we have something special here. This community of power industry professionals who so eagerly and openly share their insights, their lessons learned, and their questions to allow for constant collaboration is unparalleled anywhere else in our sector.

The most critical part of this successful undertaking, though, is of course the people behind it all. The voices in our Community who are driving those conversations and keeping readers and peers coming back again and again. To once again celebrate the importance of our community members in making Energy Central the powerhouse that it is, we’re ending the year by honoring the members on Energy Central who went above and beyond—frequently sharing news and content, reliably starting conversations across the site, and providing some of the most genuinely high-value contributions throughout 2022.

All week, we’ll be publishing articles highlighting the Top Voice of 2022 for each of our 6 Networks. As part of this tradition, some of those community members recognized were kind enough to answer a few questions to highlight what they found valuable in the sector in 2022, their predictions for 2023, and some personal insights to get to know the men and women behind it all.

𝐀𝐥𝐳𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞

One of the main features of Alzheimer’s disease is that the β-amyloid peptide, a molecule found inside neurons that has many diverse functions, begins to fold incorrectly and accumulates. This process, which ends up causing neuronal death, is linked to a series of other cellular alterations, making it difficult to determine whether they are the cause or the consequence. An example is the case of the deregulation of a type of dynorphin.

Dynorphins are the body’s own opioid peptides, which play a key role in many brain pathways. They are located in different areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus, amygdala or hypothalamus, and are involved in memory processes, emotion control, stress and pain, and among other processes. In addition, several studies have shown their involvement in epilepsy, stroke, addictions, depression and schizophrenia.

Continue reading “Big dynorphin may protect neurons from the accumulation of Alzheimer’s-associated amyloid” »

Today the international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented new measurements of rare particle transformations, or decays, that provide one of the highest-precision tests yet of a key property of the Standard Model of particle physics, known as lepton flavor universality.

Previous studies of these decays had hinted at intriguing tensions with the theoretical predictions, potentially due to the effects of new particles or forces. The results of the improved and wider-reaching analysis based on the full LHC dataset collected by the experiment during Run 1 and Run 2, which were presented at a seminar at CERN held this morning, are in line with the Standard Model expectation.

A central mystery of particle physics is why the 12 elementary quarks and leptons are arranged in pairs across three generations that are identical in all but mass, with ordinary matter comprising particles from the first, lightest generation. Lepton flavor universality states that the fundamental forces are blind to the generation to which a lepton belongs.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

A smattering of stars scattered throughout the center of the Milky Way is the remnants of the ancient galactic core, when our galaxy was still new.

Using measurements from the most accurate three-dimensional map of the galaxy ever compiled, as well as a neural network to probe the chemical compositions of over 2 million stars, a team of astronomers have identified 18,000 stars from our galaxy’s infancy, when it was just a compact collection of proto-galaxies coming together to dream of bigger things.

Hints of this stellar population have been identified in previous studies.

OWASSRF that threat actors are actively exploiting to gain arbitrary code execution through Outlook Web Access (OWA) on vulnerable servers that bypasses ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations.

A recent investigation by CrowdStrike Services found that Microsoft Exchange ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities are probably enabled the common entry vector for several Play ransomware intrusions:

The relevant logs were reviewed by CrowdStrike and no evidence of initial access exploiting CVE-2022–41040 was found.

The first measurements from a newly built gamma-ray observatory have been analyzed for signs of the decay of heavy dark matter, putting a lower limit on the hypothetical particles’ lifetime.

For a long time, researchers assumed that phonons could not contribute to the thermal Hall effect because of their lack of charge and spin. New work challenges this assumption.

How heat flows in interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the most interesting open problems in condensed-matter physics. Understanding thermal transport is particularly challenging in systems where charge-carrier contributions to energy transport are strongly suppressed, such as in insulators and superconductors. In such systems, heat transport cannot therefore be understood in terms of electronic carriers alone. In insulators, acoustic phonons are among the main energy carriers in an insulator. However, determining how and to what extent phonons contribute to heat transport in a material is the Achilles’ heel of interpreting thermal conductivity measurements. In particular, whether or not phonons can contribute to the thermal Hall effect—in which a temperature gradient in one direction produces heat flow in a perpendicular direction—remains an open question.

A pressing quest in the field of nanoelectronics is the search for a material that could replace silicon. Graphene has seemed promising for decades. But its potential has faltered along the way, due to damaging processing methods and the lack of a new electronics paradigm to embrace it. With silicon nearly maxed out in its ability to accommodate faster computing, the next big nanoelectronics platform is needed now more than ever.

Walter de Heer, Regents’ Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has taken a critical step forward in making the case for a successor to silicon. De Heer and his collaborators have developed a new nanoelectronics platform based on graphene —a single sheet of carbon atoms. The technology is compatible with conventional microelectronics manufacturing, a necessity for any viable alternative to silicon.

In the course of their research, published in Nature Communications, the team may have also discovered a new quasiparticle. Their discovery could lead to manufacturing smaller, faster, more efficient and more sustainable computer chips, and has potential implications for quantum and high-performance computing.