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Time travel makes regular appearances in popular culture, with innumerable time travel storylines in movies, television and literature. But it is a surprisingly old idea: one can argue that the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, written by Sophocles over 2,500 years ago, is the first time travel story.

But is in fact possible? Given the popularity of the concept, this is a legitimate question. As a , I find that there are several possible answers to this question, not all of which are contradictory.

The simplest answer is that time travel cannot be possible because if it was, we would already be doing it. One can argue that it is forbidden by the , like the or relativity. There are also technical challenges: it might be possible but would involve vast amounts of energy.

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The US Department of Defense’s innovative tech unit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is looking for ways to recharge drones while still in flight using laser-shooting tanker planes as the source of that energy.

“This Airborne Energy Well is a potential component of a more expansive energy web of power generation, transfer relays and receiving solutions, enabling the Department of Defense (DoD) to dynamically allocate energy resources to more flexibly deliver military effects,” the RFI notes.

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A UC Riverside genetic discovery could turn disease-carrying mosquitoes into insect Peter Pans, preventing them from ever maturing or multiplying.

In 2018, UCR entomologist Naoki Yamanaka found, contrary to accepted scientific wisdom, that an important steroid hormone requires to enter or exit fruit fly cells. The hormone, ecdysone, is called the “molting hormone.” Without it, flies will never mature, or reproduce.

Before his discovery, textbooks taught that ecdysone travels freely across cell membranes, slipping past them with ease. “We now know that’s not true,” Yamanaka said.

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New findings have revealed strange details about a bright nova that appeared in June 2021.

While these events usually fade over a period of a few weeks or even longer, V1674 Hercules was remarkable because it went faint quickly, in just over a day. The previous fastest nova faded in a period of between two to three days, and in general rapid novas are rare.

But, the rapid fade wasn’t the only remarkable thing about this system, according to new research on the nova, which determined that the energy and light output of V1674 Hercules is reverberating like a rung bell. And the “wobble” — which occurs every 501 seconds and can be seen in both visible and X-ray light — continues a year after the initial explosion.

“The most unusual thing is that this oscillation was seen before the outburst, but it was also evident when the nova was some 10 magnitudes brighter,” Mark Wagner, an astronomer at Ohio State University and co-author on the new research, said in a statement. “A mystery that people are trying to wrestle with is; what’s driving this periodicity that you would see it over that range of brightness in the system?”

Continue reading “Fastest nova ever seen ‘rings’ like a bell thanks to feeding white dwarf” | >

TSMC this afternoon has disclosed that it will expand its production capacity for mature and specialized nodes by about 50% by 2025. The plan includes building numerous new fabs in Taiwan, Japan, and China. The move will further intensify competition between TSMC and such contract makers of chips as GlobalFoundries, UMC, and SMIC.

When we talk about silicon lithography here at AnandTech, we mostly cover leading-edge nodes used produce advanced CPUs, GPUs, and mobile SoCs, as these are devices that drive progress forward. But there are hundreds of device types that are made on mature or specialized process technologies that are used alongside those sophisticated processors, or power emerging smart devices that have a significant impact on our daily lives and have gained importance in the recent years. The demand for various computing and smart devices in the recent years has exploded by so much that this has provoked a global chip supply crisis, which in turn has impacted automotive, consumer electronics, PC, and numerous adjacent industries.

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Researchers in the US have demonstrated the presence of quantum mechanical effects in acid–base interactions, challenging the Brønsted–Lowry theory. The resultant short hydrogen bond is stabilised by a delocalised proton, which rapidly shuttles between the acid and base molecules and is characterised by highly unusual spectral features.

The Brønsted–Lowry theory was proposed in 1923 and explains acid–base interactions in terms of proton transfer. This theory is one of the cornerstones of chemical understanding and is amongst the first principles taught to school students. But despite a growing appreciation for the limitations of traditional thinking, the surprising discovery of a quantum component to such fundamental reactivity was entirely serendipitous.

‘It was luck,’ admits Daniel Kuroda of Louisiana State University, one of the principal researchers involved in the study. ‘We were looking at the structure of liquids … and saw this paper [about an acid–base mixture] with close to the conductivity of sulfuric acid but no ionisation. We wanted to see what the structure was … so we started looking into the project and then realised that clearly we have something very different.’

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