Detroit is now home to the country’s first stretch of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
Science 382, 1031–1035 (2023). DOI:10.1126/science.abo0233
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Astronomers have found a massive planet orbiting a small, cool star, and planet formation theories struggle to explain its existence.
More stable clocks could measure quantum phenomena, including the presence of dark matter.
The practice of keeping time relies on stable oscillations. In grandfather clocks, the length of a second is marked by a single swing of the pendulum. In digital watches, the vibrations of a quartz crystal mark much smaller fractions of time. And in atomic clocks, the world’s state-of-the-art timekeepers, the oscillations of a laser beam stimulate atoms to vibrate at 9.2 billion times per second. These smallest, most stable divisions of time set the timing for today’s satellite communications, GPS systems, and financial markets.
A clock’s stability depends on the noise in its environment. A slight wind can throw a pendulum’s swing out of sync. And heat can disrupt the oscillations of atoms in an atomic clock. Eliminating such environmental effects can improve a clock’s precision. But only by so much.
The field of supercapacitors consistently focuses on research and challenges to improve energy efficiency, capacitance, flexibility, and stability. Low-cost laser-induced graphene (LIG) offers a promising alternative to commercially available graphene for next-generation wearable and portable devices, thanks to its remarkable specific surface area, excellent mechanical flexibility, and exceptional electrical properties. We report on the development of LIG-based flexible supercapacitors with optimized geometries, which demonstrate high capacitance and energy density while maintaining flexibility and stability. Three-dimensional porous graphene films were synthesized, and devices with optimized parameters were fabricated and tested. One type of device utilized LIG, while two other types were fabricated on LIG by coating multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) at varying concentrations.
Monolithic 3D integration of electronics based on fully 2D materials is demonstrated in the performance of artificial intelligence tasks.
An international team of researchers has used time-resolved ultrafast crystallography to follow the progress of DNA repair by a photolyase enzyme. The work is ‘the first structural characterisation of a full enzyme reaction cycle,’ says Manuel Maestre-Reyna, who led the research.
Photolyases repair DNA damage caused by ultraviolet light in bacteria, fungi, plants and some animals including marsupials. Humans and other mammals don’t contain these enzymes, but we too incur light-induced damage. One common outcome is the formation of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs), where two adjacent pyrimidine bases (thymine or cytosine) fuse together via a four-membered cyclobutane ring. ‘CPD formation is the main cause of skin cancer, and sunburnt skin always contains CPD lesions’, says Maestre-Reyna, a biochemist at the Institute of Biological Chemistry in Taipei, Taiwan.
A new study, published in PLOS ONE, has uncovered a remarkable connection between individuals’ musical preferences and their moral values, shedding new light on the profound influence that music can have on our moral compass.
The research, conducted by a team of scientists at Queen Mary University of London and ISI Foundation in Turin, Italy, employed machine learning techniques to analyze the lyrics and audio features of individuals’ favorite songs, revealing a complex interplay between music and morality.
“Our study provides compelling evidence that music preferences can serve as a window into an individual’s moral values,” stated Dr. Charalampos Saitis, one of the senior authors of the study and Lecturer in Digital Music Processing at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
