Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: chemistry – Page 13

Astronomers Have Now Spotted Galaxies So Far Away, It Raises Troubling Questions

Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed a massive galaxy cluster and an extraordinarily ancient galaxy that directly challenge the standard model of cosmology. The standard model suggests gravity acts as a patient engine that takes billions of years to slowly assemble raw gas into cosmic structures. But JWST data shows a gargantuan, tightly packed galaxy cluster existing just a few billion years after the Big Bang, warping space with a highly organized dark matter core that should not exist so early.

Looking even further back to a mere 280 million years post-Big Bang, astronomers found MoM-z14, a galaxy that is far brighter and more chemically evolved than early formation models predict. Finding such heavy and mature structures so early indicates that the fundamental timeline for how the universe assembled its mass is missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

0:00 Discovery of Galaxy Cluster XLSSC 122
2:50 Mother of Miracles.
3:26 The Cosmic Dawn.
4:26 The Farthest Galaxy Candidate.
8:32 Distribution of Galaxy Rotation.
9:38 Black Hole Cosmology.

Source:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10… https://academic.oup.com/mnras/articl… Music: Artlist Ltd Voice Over: Mathew McQuinn Buy us a cup of coffee: / @territoryspace When you buy from our store, you support us: https://my-store-10522d3.creator-spri… Visit our website: https://www.territoryspace.com/ Subscribe to Territory — / @territoryspace Instagram — instagram.com/territoryspace.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.11263v2
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/articl…

Music: Artlist Ltd.

Voice Over: Mathew McQuinn.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Now Spotted Galaxies So Far Away, It Raises Troubling Questions” | >

Discovery helps explain why solid-state batteries often fail

Exactly how those dendrites form is still up for debate. While the interface between the battery’s electrolyte and electrodes has been the focus of most research, another culprit is the boundary where two grains of electrolyte in a solid material meet. Researchers know these boundaries can seed dendrites within electrolytes, although the effects have been difficult to study.

Now researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have uncovered why such boundaries can lead to dendrites: Hidden electrical imbalances across the boundaries affect how the electrolyte conducts electrical charges, which influences how the ions and electrons move through the material during battery operation. In a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers characterized the electrical and chemical behavior of the boundaries and showed that adjusting how the electrolyte is processed enhances the movement of ions while reducing electron leakage. This adjustment can increase critical current density by more than 300 percent, which could enable solid-state batteries that charge faster and last longer.

Light-powered chip harvests energy, computes and senses chemicals in one stack

Most contemporary portable electronics, including laptops, smartphones and smart watches, are powered by batteries that need to be recharged daily or every few days. Over the past decade, however, some engineers have been exploring the possibility of developing battery-free electronic devices that autonomously derive electricity from renewable sources, such as sunlight, indoor lighting or heat.

A research team at Penn State University recently developed a compact integrated circuit (IC) that harvests energy solely from ambient light, using this energy to run computations and sense chemicals in its surroundings. This new chip, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could enable the development of devices that never require charging and thus continue working uninterrupted even in environments where replacement batteries and electrical sockets are not available.

“This work grew out of a broader question we have been asking in my group: Can we build electronic systems that do not simply sense information, but also process that information locally and power themselves from their environment?” Saptarshi Das, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Many future Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-computing systems will need to operate in remote or hard-to-access locations, where replacing batteries is impractical. We wanted to demonstrate a compact, fully integrated chip that combines energy harvesting, sensing and computation in a single monolithic three-dimensional architecture.”

Baseline tool could separate alien life signals from geology on ocean worlds

When it comes to the search for life elsewhere in the universe, methane and other chemical compounds are seen as signs of biology because they are often produced by living microbes. However, scientists can be misled because certain geological processes can produce chemical signatures identical to those of living organisms.

To help identify true biological signals and reduce the risk of false detections, researchers have developed a framework that models what a planet’s chemistry looks like without life.

Their research is published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Saturn-ring-like laser emission from chiral polymeric microspheres

Controlling light within microscopic spaces is crucial for next-generation optical devices such as photonic integrated circuits and localized sensors. Microspheres formed of luminescent π-conjugated polymers act as optical resonators that confine and amplify light via whispering gallery modes (WGMs), and they are promising candidates for microscale organic lasers and photonic applications. However, conventional microsphere resonators are geometrically isotropic and emit isotropic light, making directional control of emissions challenging.

In a new study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from the University of Tsukuba show that microspheres formed through the self-assembly of chiral π-conjugated polymers possess a characteristic twisted bipolar molecular configuration, enabling angle-selective optical resonance and laser oscillation with distinct azimuthal directionality. Using polarization-dependent photoluminescence imaging, the research team directly visualized a vortex-like (swirling) arrangement formed by the polymer main chains on the spherical surface.

Furthermore, this vortex-like surface molecular orientation induces an azimuth-dependent refractive-index distribution along the light propagation path, resulting in angle-dependent WGM resonance wavelengths and spatially localized emission. Consequently, the microspheres exhibit directional laser oscillation, preferentially emitting amplified light along a specific azimuthal direction. The resulting emission pattern is analogous to Saturn’s rings.

Quantum computers model nine fusion fuel material configurations for first time

A team of scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Cleveland Clinic and IBM has calculated nine molecular configurations of a promising material to produce fuel for fusion energy—the first known instance of such computations on quantum computers.

Such calculations, demonstrated in a new paper published on the arXiv preprint server, are computationally challenging for classical computers to scale when working alone. They are a fundamental step toward optimizing the production and extraction of tritium—an extremely rare material in nature that is necessary to produce fusion energy with most of the proposed machines. Ensuring adequate supplies of tritium has long been a barrier to realizing the promise of clean, abundant energy from fusion power plants, and solving this issue is a key objective of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission.

Quantum computers are well-suited to computing the atomic-level chemistry of a liquid salt that contains fluorine, lithium and beryllium (FLiBe), one of the leading candidate materials for extracting tritium fuel in fusion reactors. To compute different configurations of clusters of FLiBe, the team used the same quantum-centric supercomputing techniques now being applied to 12,635-atom protein simulations with Cleveland Clinic. These methods can calculate the quantum behavior of electrons in complex materials, complementing and enhancing the capabilities of classical supercomputers and algorithms.

Quantum vacuum could help break molecular bonds with less energy, simulations suggest

A team of researchers led by Felipe Herrera, a professor at the University of Santiago and a researcher at the Millennium Institute for Research in Optics (MIRO), has identified a quantum phenomenon that enables chemical bonds to be broken using significantly less energy than is normally required.

The findings, published in Physical Review Letters under the title “Enhancing Infrared-Laser Dissociation of Molecules with the Electromagnetic Vacuum,” demonstrate that by using infrared light, the natural fluctuations present in the electromagnetic vacuum can promote molecular dissociation when molecules are confined within specially designed nanometer-scale structures known as nanocavities.

Although we often think of a vacuum as completely empty space, quantum physics shows that it is filled with tiny energy fluctuations. The researchers discovered that these fluctuations can be amplified inside a nanocavity, altering molecular vibrations and making it easier for an infrared laser to break chemical bonds.

A New Way To See Life’s Hidden Chemistry: $10 Spectrometer Could Turn Wearables Into Personal Health Labs

Researchers have developed a compact, low-cost convolutional spectrometer that delivers lab-grade precision for applications ranging from industrial quality control to non-invasive health monitoring.

/* */