A continuation of the enlightenment values that freed mankind of superstition.
Anders Sandberg discusses achieving a transhumanist utopia.
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IBM’s new quantum computer, Osprey, is more than triple the size of its previous record-breaking Eagle processor.
Summary: Using monoclonal antibodies instead of conventional immunosuppressant drugs preserves stem cells in mouse brains.
Source: University of Michigan.
A new approach to stem cell therapy that uses antibodies instead of traditional immunosuppressant drugs robustly preserves cells in mouse brains and has potential to fast-track trials in humans, a Michigan Medicine study suggests.
After several years of developing the theoretical ideas, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have validated multiple novel predictions about the fundamental mechanism of transport of atoms and molecules (penetrants) in chemically complex molecular and polymer liquid matrices.
The study from Materials Science and Engineering (MatSE) Professor Ken Schweizer and Dr. Baicheng Mei, published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), extended the theory and tested it against a large amount of experimental data. MatSE Associate Professor Chris Evans and graduate student Grant Sheridan collaborated on this research by providing additional experimental measurements.
“We developed an advanced, state-of-the art theory to predict how molecules move through complex media, especially in polymer liquids,” Schweizer said. “The theory abstracted what the important features are of the chemically complex molecules and of the polymeric medium that they’re moving through that control their rate of transport.”
Chirality is the breaking of reflection and inversion symmetries. Simply put, it is when an object’s mirror images cannot be superimposed over each other. A common example are your two hands—while mirror images of each other, they can never overlap. Chirality appears at all levels in nature and is ubiquitous.
In addition to static chirality, chirality can also occur due to dynamic motion including rotation. With this in mind, we can distinguish true and false chirality. A system is truly chiral if—when translating—space inversion does not equate to time reversal combined with a proper spatial rotation.
Phonons are quanta (or small packets) of energy associated with the vibration of atoms in a crystal lattice. Recently, phonons with chiral properties have been theorized and experimentally discovered in two-dimensional (2D) materials such as tungsten diselenide. The discovered chiral phonons are rotating—yet not propagating—atomic motions. But, truly chiral phonons would be atomic motions that are both rotating and propagating, and these have never been observed in three-dimensional (3D) bulk systems.
Vibrating tiny robots could revolutionize research.
Individual robots can work collectively as swarms to create major advances in everything from construction to surveillance, but microrobots’ small scale is ideal for drug delivery, disease diagnosis, and even surgeries.
Despite their potential, microrobots’ size often means they have limited sensing, communication, motility, and computation abilities, but new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology enhances their ability to collaborate efficiently. The work offers a new system to control swarms of 300 3-millimeter microbristle robots’ (microbots) ability to aggregate and disperse controllably without onboard sensing.
Organic photovoltaics, solar energy devices based on organic semiconductors, have so far achieved very promising results in experimental settings, both in terms of efficiency and stability. However, engineers have not yet devised reliable strategies to fabricate these devices on a large-scale at a reasonable cost.
Researchers at Wuhan University in China have recently identified an approach that could facilitate the rapid fabrication of photoactive layers for organic solar cells, without compromising the cells’ efficiency and stability. Their proposed strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, is based on sequential deposition, a method often used to deposit organic semiconductors and perovskite films on substrates.
“To realize the commercialization of organic photovoltaics (OPVs), the golden triangle of power conversion efficiency (PCE), stability, and cost should be considered simultaneously,” Jie Min, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.
A new and more efficient way of modeling and designing power electronic converters using artificial intelligence (AI) has been created by a team of experts from Cardiff University and the Compound Semiconductor Applications (CSA) Catapult.
The method has reduced design times for technology by up to 78% compared to traditional approaches and was used to create a device with an efficiency of over 98%.
The team’s findings have been published in the IEEE Open Journal of Power Electronics and IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.
A series of demonstrations by Micius—a low-orbit satellite with quantum capabilities—lays the groundwork for a satellite-based quantum communication network.
Few things have captured the scientific imagination quite like the vastness of space and the promise of quantum technology. Micius—the Chinese Academy of Science’s quantum communications satellite launched in 2016—has connected these two inspiring domains, producing a string of exciting first demonstrations in quantum space communications. Reviewing the efforts leading up to the satellite launch and the major outcomes of the mission, Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China provide a perspective on what the future of quantum space communications may look like [1]. The success of this quantum-satellite mission proves the viability of several space-based quantum communications protocols, providing a solid foundation for future improvements that may lead to an Earth-spanning quantum communications network (Fig. 1).
Photons, the quanta of light, are wonderful carriers of quantum information because they are easy to manipulate and travel extremely fast. They can be created in a desired quantum state or as the output of some quantum sensor or quantum computer. Quantum entanglement between multiple photons—the nonclassical correlation between their quantum states—can be amazingly useful in quantum communications protocols such as quantum key distribution (QKD), a cryptography approach that can theoretically guarantee absolute information security. QKD schemes have been demonstrated on distances of a few hundreds of kilometers—sufficient to cover communications networks between cities. But increasing their range, eventually to the global scale, is a formidable challenge.
