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Category: chemistry – Page 79

Saturday Citations: On chimpanzee playwrights; the nature of dark energy; deep-diving Antarctic seals

This week, researchers reported the world’s second-tiniest toad, winning the silver in the Brachycephalus contest. Chemists at UCLA disproved a 100-year-old organic chemistry rule. And researchers in Kenya report that elephants don’t like bees, which could be a conservation boon (for the elephants. And maybe also the bees?). Additionally, scientists addressed an old thought experiment about monkeys and the theater, physicists correlated dark energy with the black hole population in the universe, and a group of Antarctic seals were found to be highly strategic and also adorable:

Joachim Keppler — The Path to Sentient Robots: AI Consciousness in the Light of New Insights …

The question of the conditions under which Artificial Intelligence (AI) can transcend the threshold of consciousness can only be answered with certainty if we manage to unravel the mechanism underlying conscious systems. The most promising strategy to approach this goal is to unveil the brain’s functional principle involved in the formation of conscious states and to transfer the findings to other physical systems. Empirical evidence suggests that the dynamical features of conscious brain processes can be ascribed to self-organized criticality and phase transitions, the deeper understanding of which requires methods of quantum electrodynamics (QED). QED-based model calculations reveal that both the architectural structure and the chemical composition of the brain are specifically designed to establish resonant coupling to the ubiquitous electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, known as zero-point field (ZPF). A direct consequence of resonant brain-ZPF coupling is the selective amplification of field modes, which leads us to conclude that the distinctive feature of conscious processes consists in modulating the ZPF. These insights support the hypothesis that the ZPF is a foundational field with inherent phenomenal qualities, implying that the crucial condition for AI consciousness lies in a robot’s capacity to tap into the phenomenal spectrum immanent in the ZPF.

Full Title: The Path to Sentient Robots: AI Consciousness in the Light of New Insights into the Functioning of the Brain.

Non-lithium alternatives: Reliance completes sodium-ion acquisition, Amazon tries ‘membrane-free’ flow battery

India’s Reliance Industries has completed the takeover of sodium-ion battery company Faradion, while Amazon is set to trial a novel flow battery technology.

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) presently dominates the global energy storage and electric vehicle (EV) sectors as the battery chemistry of choice.

Holographic 3D Printing has the potential to Revolutionize Multiple Industries

A pioneering technique shows how sound can be used to create entire objects quickly and at once. Researchers at Concordia have developed a novel method of 3D printing that uses acoustic holograms. And they say it’s quicker than existing methods and capable of making more complex objects.

The process, called holographic direct sound printing (HDSP), is described in a recent article in the journal Nature Communications. It builds on a method introduced in 2022 that described how sonochemical reactions in microscopic cavitations regions — tiny bubbles — create extremely high temperatures and pressure for trillionths of a second to harden resin into complex patterns.

Now, by embedding the technique in acoustic holograms that contain cross-sectional images of a particular design, polymerization occurs much more quickly. It can create objects simultaneously rather than voxel-by-voxel.

Huntington’s Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments

“This research marks the first time that we have been able to identify a specific chemical change that is unique to the development of Huntington’s disease, which opens the possibility of developing new tests to study the early changes of the disease before irreversible damage occurs.”

U.K. and German researchers are hopeful that their discovery of a key biochemical change involved in the development of Huntington’s disease could lead to its early detection and treatment.

1992, 31 October

On this day in 1992, the Vatican admitted that Galileo was correct in believing that the earth went around the sun.

2. In the first place, I wish to congratulate the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for having chosen to deal, in its plenary session, with a problem of great importance and great relevance today: the problem of ‘the emergence of complexity in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology’

The emergence of the subject of complexity probably marks in the history of the natural sciences a stage as important as the stage which bears relation to the name of Galileo, when a univocal model of order seemed to be obvious. Complexity indicates precisely that, in order to account for the rich variety of reality, we must have recourse to a number of different models.

This realisation poses a question which concerns scientists, philosophers and theologians: how are we to reconcile the explanation of the world – beginning with the level of elementary entities and phenomena – with the recognition of the fact that ‘the whole is more than the sum of its parts’?

Nuclear Rockets could Travel to Mars in Half the Time, but designing the Reactors that would Power them isn’t

NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade—but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip.

This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half the time.

Nuclear fission involves harvesting the incredible amount of energy released when an atom is split by a neutron. This reaction is known as a fission reaction. Fission technology is well established in power generation and nuclear-powered submarines, and its application to drive or power a rocket could one day give NASA a faster, more powerful alternative to chemically driven rockets.