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“A Big Deal” — Physicists Solve 20-Year Mystery of Stable Chiral Nanostructures

Researchers have finally succeeded in building a long-sought nanoparticle structure, opening the door to new materials with special properties.

Alex Travesset does not have a sparkling research lab stocked with the most cutting-edge instruments for probing new nanomaterials and measuring their unique properties.

Instead of using traditional laboratory instruments, Alex Travesset, a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and an affiliate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory, relies on computer models, equations, and figures to understand the behavior of new nanomaterials.

Neuralink 2022 Show and Tell Condensed

I wanted to focus on the animal testing portion of the Show and Tell. Neuralink representatives showed us videos of a pig that has a cortex and spinal chip in its body. It also has pin points on joints in its leg that are sending data to the Neuralink scientist. When the scientist stimulates a joint it creates an uncontrolled movement. The pig moves its leg without wanting too, but because someone else wanted it too, the pig did not want to move. That’s the focus of this video.

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The Biggest Discoveries in Computer Science in 2022

As computer scientists tackle a greater range of problems, their work has grown increasingly interdisciplinary. This year, many of the most significant computer science results also involved other scientists and mathematicians. Perhaps the most practical involved the cryptographic questions underlying the security of the internet, which tend to be complicated mathematical problems. One such problem — the product of two elliptic curves and their relation to an abelian surface — ended up bringing down a promising new cryptography scheme that was thought to be strong enough to withstand an attack from a quantum computer. And a different set of mathematical relationships, in the form of one-way functions, will tell cryptographers if truly secure codes are even possible.

Computer science, and quantum computing in particular, also heavily overlaps with physics. In one of the biggest developments in theoretical computer science this year, researchers posted a proof of the NLTS conjecture, which (among other things) states that a ghostly connection between particles known as quantum entanglement is not as delicate as physicists once imagined. This has implications not just for our understanding of the physical world, but also for the myriad cryptographic possibilities that entanglement makes possible.

Billionaires are investing in brain-computer-interface systems. Here’s why

The technology has significantly progressed in the past 50 years.

Earlier this month, we reported that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed foundations (Gates Frontier and Bezos Expeditions) joined other companies.

A fifty year history.


1, 2, 3

Finally, Peter Thiel, a billionaire cofounder of PayPal, invested last year in an older BCI startup called Utah’s Blackrock Neurotech that has announced it hopes to apply for Food and Drug Administration approval soon. What is behind this popular rush to support BCI firms?

Scientists can now “see” things without “looking” at them using a new quantum technique

“We also demonstrated that even very low-power microwave pulses can be detected efficiently using our protocol.”

A team of scientists has devised a means of using quantum mechanics to “view” objects indirectly. The new method could improve measurements for quantum computers and other systems. It brings together the quantum and classical worlds.

We “see” things via the complex interaction of light photons within specialized cells in the retina of our eyes. However, some scientists have speculated that a similar phenomenon could be replicated without photo-absorption or without any light.