Lifeboat Foundation

It’s not “The Last of Us,” but it sure is weird. Here’s how mushrooms and fungi can be used to carry out problems computers typically solve.

It can boost conductivity by a billion percent.

A collaboration of physicists working at different institutes in the U.S. have discovered a new quantum state in an alloy made of magnesium, silicon, and tellurium, a press release said. The finding could result in applications in quantum computing, such as building sensors and communication systems.

Electrons can move around freely inside the structure.

Continue reading “Researchers discover new quantum state in a quirky material” »

Apollo’s successful computing software was optimized to deal with unknown problems and to interrupt one task to take on a more important one.

Two teams demonstrate an innovative way to measure the states of spin-based qubits—a key task in quantum computing.

The congealed mat of yeast and bacteria cells that forms on top of the brewed drink kombucha could be used to make light, cheap and flexible circuit boards for wearable electronics or even partially living rudimentary computers.

Electronic devices generate heat, and that heat must be dissipated. If it isn’t, the high temperatures can compromise device function, or even damage the devices and their surroundings.

Now, a team from UIUC and UC Berkeley have published a paper in Nature Electronics detailing a new cooling method that offers a host of benefits, not the least of which is space efficiency that offers a substantial increase over conventional approaches in devices’ power per unit volume.

Tarek Gebrael, the lead author and a PhD student in mechanical engineering, explains that the existing solutions suffer from three shortcomings. “First, they can be expensive and difficult to scale up,” he says. Heat spreaders made of diamond, for example, are sometimes used at the chip level, but they aren’t cheap.

The OVM6948 is the only ultra small “chip on tip” camera with backside illumination, which provides excellent image quality.

Recently an international collaboration of astronomers released the most accurate map yet of all the matter in the universe, to help to understand dark matter, and now this is being joined by the largest two-dimensional map of the entire sky, which can help in the study of dark energy. A data release from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey shared the results from six years of scanning almost half of the sky, totaling one petabyte of data from three different telescopes.

The reason that such large-scale data is required to study dark energy and dark matter is that these can only be detected due to their effects on ordinary matter — so researchers need to look at many galaxies to track how these otherwise unseen forces are adding mass or affecting the interaction between galaxies. This particular map was created to help scientists identify 40 million target galaxies which will be studied as part of the DESI Spectroscopic Survey.

To make the map as comprehensive as possible, the researchers included data taken in the near-infrared wavelength as well as the visible light wavelength. That is important as the light from distant galaxies appears redshifted, or shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, due to the expansion of the universe. “The addition of near-infrared wavelength data to the Legacy Survey will allow us to better calculate the redshifts of distant galaxies, or the amount of time it took light from those galaxies to reach Earth,” explained one of the researchers, Alfredo Zenteno of NSF’s NOIRLab, in a statement.

Bits of the stars are all around us, and in us, too. About half of the abundance of elements heavier than iron originates in some of the most violent explosions in the cosmos. As the universe churns and new stars and planets form out of old gas and dust, these elements eventually make their way to Earth and other worlds. After 3.7 billion years of evolution on our planet, humans and many other species have come to rely on them in our bodies and our lives. Iodine, for instance, is a component of hormones we need to control our brain development and regulate our metabolism. Ocean microplankton called Acantharea use the element strontium to create intricate mineral skeletons. Gallium is critical for the chips in our smartphones and our laptop screens. And the mirrors of the JWST are gilded with gold, an element useful for its unreactive nature and ability to reflect infrared light (not to mention its popularity in jewelry).

Scientists have long had a basic idea of how these elements come to be, but for many years the details were hazy and fiercely debated. That changed recently when astronomers observed, for the first time, heavy-element synthesis in action. The process, the evidence suggests, went something like this.

Continue reading “How Star Collisions Forge the Universe’s Heaviest Elements” »