The encrypted chats detect when you take a screenshot.
After several years of development, Facebook’s Messenger platform will let you switch to end-to-end encrypted chats and calls with anyone. It also now supports features like Reactions and replies inside encrypted chats.
Three separate teams worldwide published the feat on Nature — all on the same day.
In a historic milestone for silicon-based quantum computing systems, three separate teams of researchers have published papers on Nature, detailing the steps and system architecture required for fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Lister says during this talent shortage, companies are going to need to meet the demands of workers, which will likely include a hybrid model.
Her research found that 56% of U.S. workers have a job that can be done at least partially remotely. She says allowing employees to shift their hours, which days they work, and even when they take a break can have a huge impact on retention.
Technology will have an outsized role in how companies implement their hybrid models. Lister says that within five years, employees may be able to meet via hologram instead of through a video call.
Frogs briefly treated with a five-drug cocktail administered by a wearable bioreactor on the stump were able to regrow a functional, nearly complete limb.
For millions of patients who have lost limbs for reasons ranging from diabetes to trauma, the possibility of regaining function through natural regeneration remains out of reach. Regrowth of legs and arms remains the province of salamanders and superheroes.
But in a study published in the journal Science Advances, scientists at Tufts University and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have brought us a step closer to the goal of regenerative medicine.
A newly created nano-architected material exhibits a property that previously was just theoretically possible: it can refract light backward, regardless of the angle at which the light strikes the material.
This property is known as negative refraction and it means that the refractive index—the speed that light can travel through a given material—is negative across a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum at all angles.
Refraction is a common property in materials; think of the way a straw in a glass of water appears shifted to the side, or the way lenses in eyeglasses focus light. But negative refraction does not just involve shifting light a few degrees to one side. Rather, the light is sent in an angle completely opposite from the one at which it entered the material. This has not been observed in nature but, beginning in the 1960s, was theorized to occur in so-called artificially periodic materials—that is, materials constructed to have a specific structural pattern. Only now have fabrication processes have caught up to theory to make negative refraction a reality.
New biodegradable straws developed in China are as cheap as plastic, stronger than paper, and made from edible materials — but can they make a difference in the global plastic waste problem?
Plastic everywhere: People produce 330 million tons of plastic every year. Less than 9% of it is recycled, and about 12% is incinerated — the rest ends up polluting our natural environment or languishing in landfills.
Continue reading “New biodegradable straws are made by bacteria” »
All-polymer blend solar cells are expected to play an important role in the transition to clean energy technologies because they can be easily produced in large-scale flexible sheets. However, their performance has lagged behind that of more traditional silicon alternatives, as well as other organic solar cells.
All-polymer blend solar cells are formed by combining two polymer solutions that solidify into a film on an electrode with in the form of interpenetrating networks, a kind of “phase-separation.” The introduction of solvent additives to the polymer solution has been shown to increase the efficiency of all-polymer blend solar cells. However, the exact process underlying this improvement has not been fully understood. Now, in a study recently published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, researchers from Nara Institute of Science and Technology have investigated the performance enhancement mechanism using photoconductive atomic force microscopy (PC-AFM). Their findings are expected to help accelerate the widespread application of polymer-based solar cells.
“The empirical nature of solvent additive-mediated efficiency enhancement has hindered the optimization of all-polymer blend solar cell performance, so there has been an urgent need for a greater understanding of the process,” explains senior author Hiroaki Benten. “To that end, we used PC-AFM to interrogate the nanoarchitecture that underpins the performance enhancement.”
Danish renewable energy provider, Eurowind Energy, has chosen ampere.cloud as a partner to monitor its PV portfolio after an intensive process of technical due diligence. A conversation:
Meta’s new AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) is a metaverse and AI beast — 16,000 GPUs, 16TB/sec training data, 175PB bulk storage.
Time crystals. Microwaves. Diamonds. What do these three disparate things have in common?
Quantum computing. Unlike traditional computers that use bits, quantum computers use qubits to encode information as zeros or ones, or both at the same time. Coupled with a cocktail of forces from quantum physics, these refrigerator-sized machines can process a whole lot of information — but they’re far from flawless. Just like our regular computers, we need to have the right programming languages to properly compute on quantum computers.
Programming quantum computers requires awareness of something called “entanglement,” a computational multiplier for qubits of sorts, which translates to a lot of power. When two qubits are entangled, actions on one qubit can change the value of the other, even when they are physically separated, giving rise to Einstein’s characterization of “spooky action at a distance.” But that potency is equal parts a source of weakness. When programming, discarding one qubit without being mindful of its entanglement with another qubit can destroy the data stored in the other, jeopardizing the correctness of the program.
