Researchers claim to have combined the benefits of rolling robots with those of flying drones by creating a device that rotates along the ground but hops over obstacles.
Can a computer therefore replicate the way a discretionary trader reads the Financial Times, to harvest alpha from the FT?
This research demonstrates how equity traders can use machine-readable FT news articles to create systematic trading strategies for large-cap US stocks.
Astronomers have created the largest yet cosmic 3D map of quasars: bright and active centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. This map shows the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, with the furthest shining bright when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old.
The new map has been made with data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. While Gaia’s main objective is to map the stars in our own galaxy, in the process of scanning the sky it also spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies.
The graphic representation of the map (bottom right on the infographic) shows us the location of quasars from our vantage point, the centre of the sphere. The regions empty of quasars are where the disc of our galaxy blocks our view.
As we speak, the comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (Pons-Brooks, for short) is making its way around the inner region of the Solar System for the first time in more than 70 years – and might soon become visible to the naked eye.
At approximately 30 kilometres (19 miles) across, this giant icy lump is comparable in size to Mount Everest, says astrophysicist Dr Paul Strøm, and is “one of the brightest known periodic comets”
A Halley-type comet, Pons-Brooks completes its journey around the Sun every 71.3 years and was last spotted in our skies in 1954.
Our immune system is talented at telling the difference between the chemistry of our own body and that of an invading pathogen. When it malfunctions, our body can become host to an intense civil war.
Scientists are keen to understand this in more detail, and a newly identified ‘switch’ that deactivates a sensor of foreign DNA may provide important insight.
A key part of this discovery, made by a team from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, is an enzyme called cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS).
Prof. Hagit Messer-Yaron from Tel Aviv University (TAU) is the recipient of the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) medal for Environmental and Safety Technology for outstanding accomplishments in the application of technology in the fields of interest of IEEE that improve the environment and/or public safety. The award consists of a bronze medal, certificate, and cash honorarium.
More than 7,000 years ago, people navigated the Mediterranean Sea using technologically sophisticated boats, according to a study published March 20, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Juan F. Gibaja of the Spanish National Research Council, Barcelona and colleagues.
Many of the most important civilizations in Europe originated on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. During the Neolithic, communities clearly traveled and traded across the water, as evidenced by watercraft in the archaeological record and the presence of settlements on coasts and islands. In this study, Gibaja and colleagues provide new insights into the history of seafaring technology through analysis of canoes at the Neolithic lakeshore village of La Marmotta, near Rome, Italy.
Excavation at this site has recovered five canoes built from hollowed-out trees (dugout canoes) dating between 5,700 and 5,100 BC. Analysis of these boats reveals that they are built from four different types of wood, unusual among similar sites, and that they include advanced construction techniques such as transverse reinforcements.
For the past hundred years, it has been widely recognized through X-ray and electron diffraction measurements that graphene interlayers can only accommodate a single layer of alkali metal. Each layer being fully filled by single layer alkali metal atoms is considered the theoretical charging limit.
However, there have been no reports of studies directly observing the atomic arrangement of interlayer alkali metals and verifying whether graphene layers can only accommodate a single layer of alkali metal atoms or whether other techniques can achieve higher density or multiple layers of alkali metals.
The research team developed a technique to insert dense alkali metals between graphene layers. Utilizing a high-performance low-voltage (60 kV) electron microscope, they have successfully observed the arrangement structure of alkali metal atoms between the graphene layers. The alkali metals are found densely packed in a two-layer structure in both bilayer graphene and in the surface layer graphite due to the flexible extension ability of their interlayer spacing.
A superfluid vortex controlled in a lab is helping physicists learn more about the behavior of black holes.
A whirlpool generated in helium cooled to just a fraction above absolute zero mimics the gravitational environment of these objects to such high precision that it’s giving unprecedented insight into how they drag and warp the space-time around them.
“Using superfluid helium has allowed us to study tiny surface waves in greater detail and accuracy than with our previous experiments in water,” explains physicist Patrik Švančara of the University of Nottingham in the UK, who led the research.
Fidelity benchmarking of an analogue quantum simulator reaches a high-entanglement regime where exact classical simulation of quantum systems becomes impractical, and enables a new method for evaluating the mixed-state entanglement of quantum devices.
