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Volume Collapse: Engineering Professor Solves Deep Earthquake Mystery

A University of California San Diego engineering professor has solved one of the biggest mysteries in geophysics: What causes deep-focus earthquakes?

These mysterious earthquakes originate between 400 and 700 kilometers below the surface of the Earth and have been recorded with magnitudes up to 8.3 on the Richter scale.

Xanthippi Markenscoff, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is the person who solved this mystery. Her paper “Volume collapse instabilities in deep earthquakes: a shear source nucleated and driven by pressure” appears in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

New neuroelectronic system can read and modify brain circuits

As researchers learn more about the brain, it has become clear that responsive neurostimulation is becoming increasingly effective at probing neural circuit function and treating neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. But current approaches to designing a fully implantable and biocompatible device able to make such interventions have major limitations: their resolution isn’t high enough and most require large, bulky components that make implantation difficult with risk of complications.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Dion Khodagholy, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has come up with a new approach that shows great promise to improve such devices. Building on their earlier work to develop smaller, more efficient conformable bioelectronic transistors and materials, the researchers orchestrated their devices to create implantable circuits that enable allow reading and manipulation of brain circuits. Their multiplex-then-amplify (MTA) system requires only one amplifier per multiplexer, in contrast to that need an equal number of amplifiers as number of channels.

“It is critical to be able to detect and intervene to treat brain-disorder-related symptoms, such as epileptic seizures, in real time,” said Khodagholy, a leader in bio-and neuroelectronics design. “Not only is our system much smaller and more flexible than current devices, but it also enables simultaneous stimulation of arbitrary waveforms on multiple independent channels, so it is much more versatile.

China rocket debris likely plunged into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, says China’s space agency

Debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket likely plunged into the Indian Ocean, just west of the Maldives, on Saturday night ET, China’s space agency said.

Most of the huge Long March 5B rocket, however, burned up on reentering the atmosphere, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a post on WeChat.

It was unclear if any debris had landed on the atoll nation.

MIT: On Course to Create a Fusion Power Plant

How an MIT engineering course became an incubator for fusion design innovations.

“There is no lone genius who solves all the problems.”

Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is reflecting on a guiding belief behind his nuclear science and engineering class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering). He has recently watched his students, working in teams, make their final presentations on how to use fusion technology to create carbon-free fuel for shipping vessels. Since taking on the course over a decade ago, Whyte has moved away from standard lectures, prodding the class to work collectively on finding solutions to “real-world” issues. Over the past years the course, and its collaborative approach to design, has been instrumental in guiding the real future of fusion at the PSFC.

John Martinis awarded the seventh Bell Prize

John Martinis has done groundbreaking research on coherent superconducting devices since his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. These superconducting devices can be modeled as lumped-element electric circuits using Josephson junctions, capacitors and inductors as components. The fact that a superconducting phase across a Josephson junction can display coherent quantum behavior – even though it is a property of the wave function of an immense number of electrons – can be viewed as a fundamental discovery [1], kickstarting, in retrospect, the field of superconducting quantum computing.

John Martinis invented and developed the superconducting phase qubit, based on a current-biased Josephson junction, for the purpose of scalable multi-qubit quantum computing [2]. In 2002, he first demonstrated coherent Rabi oscillations and quantum measurement for such superconducting phase qubit [3]. He has had a longstanding interest in understanding the origin of noise in superconducting electric circuits as these sources of noise naturally limit qubit coherence. In particular, his understanding of noise sources such as dielectric loss, flux noise and the presence and dynamics of quasi-particles [4], by means of simple physical models, have been instrumental in the field. The effect and mitigation of quasi-particles and how they are affected by radiation and cosmic rays continues to be of high interest for the future of superconducting quantum devices [5, 6].

An important step showing his leadership and commitment to building a quantum computer came with his 2014 move, as a Professor at UCSB, to Google, where he gathered a large team of physicists and engineers to tackle the challenge of making a multi-qubit programmable processor. This team has excelled in its relentless focus on optimizing device performance by implementing successful engineering choices for qubit design, couplers and scalable I/O.

Engineering student helps federal experts solve a messy 3D printing problem

Tomographic 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that uses light to create three-dimensional objects. A projector beams light at a rotating vial containing photocurable resin, and within seconds the desired shape forms inside the vial. The light projections needed to solidify specific 3D regions of the polymer are calculated using tomographic imaging concepts.

The technology was first demonstrated by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2019, and a Swiss group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020. It is significantly faster than traditional 3D printing in layers, can print around existing objects, and does not require support structures.

Though incredible, the technology can get messy in the lab. The vial’s round shape makes it refract rays like a lens. To counter this, experts use a rectangular index-matching bath that provides a flat surface for rays to pass through correctly. The vial of resin must be dipped in and out of the bath for each use—creating a slimy situation.

Dr. Anil Achyuta — TDK Ventures — Founding Member — Deep-Tech Healthcare And Energy Investments

Deep-tech healthcare & energy investments for a sustainable future — dr. anil achyuta, investment director / founding member, TDK ventures.


Dr. Anil Achyuta is an Investment Director and a Founding Member at TDK Ventures, which is a deep-tech corporate venture fund of TDK Corporation, the Japanese multinational electronics company that manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media.

Anil is passionate about energy and healthcare sectors as he believes these are the most impactful areas to building a sustainable future – a mission directly in line with TDK Ventures’ goal.

At TDK Ventures, Anil has reviewed over 1050 start-ups and invested in: 1) Autoflight — an electric vertical take-off and landing company, 2) Genetesis — a magnetic imaging-based cardiac diagnostics company, 3) Origin — 3D printing mass manufacturing company, 4) Exo — hand-held 3D ultrasound imaging company, 5) GenCell — ammonia-to-energy hydrogen fuel cell company, 6) Mojo Vision – augmented reality contact lens company, and 7) Battery Resourcers – a direct to cathode lithium ion battery recycling company.

From his seven investments, Anil has secured two exits. GenCell IPO’d on Tel Aviv’s Stock Exchange, and Origin was acquired by the #1 3D Printing company in the world, Stratasys, for $100M.

New algorithm uses a hologram to control trapped ions

Researchers have discovered the most precise way to control individual ions using holographic optical engineering technology.

The new technology uses the first known holographic optical engineering device to control trapped ion qubits. This technology promises to help create more precise controls of qubits that will aid the development of quantum industry-specific hardware to further new quantum simulation experiments and potentially quantum error correction processes for trapped ion qubits.

“Our algorithm calculates the hologram’s profile and removes any aberrations from the light, which lets us develop a highly precise technique for programming ions,” says lead author Chung-You Shih, a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC).

Katherine Sizov — Strella Biotech — Bio-Sensing To Reduce Food Waste And Optimize Supply Chains

Novel bio-sensing technologies to reduce food waste and optimize supply chains — a US$1 trillion need — katherine sizov — founder, strella biotechnology.


An estimated 40% of all global produce is wasted due to spoilage that occurs before it ever reaches consumers’ grocery bags. And this loss, not only represents loss due to quality or ripeness standards that consumers desire, but also a significant impact on global emissions and fresh water supplies that it took to produce and transport that produce, representing a combined figure of US$1 Trillion annually.

Katherine Sizov is the Founder of Strella Biotechnology (https://www.strellabiotech.com/), a company that builds novel bio-sensing platforms that can predict the ripeness of fruit and ultimately use this information to optimize supply chains by reducing food waste and increasing produce margins.

Strella won the 2019 President’s Innovation Prize (PIP) award from University of Pennsylvania, the grand prize at the Arizona State University Innovation Open, and the Venture Award at O3 World’s 1682 conference, and is recently is coming off of a US$3.3 million seed round with some very prominent institutional investors, including Marc Cuban Companies, Yamaha Motor Ventures & Laboratory Silicon Valley, and Catapult Ventures.

Katherine studied Molecular Biology and Chemistry, as well as Engineering Entrepreneurship, at the University of Pennsylvania.

More Compact and Efficient Vertical Turbines Could Be the Future for Wind Farms

The now-familiar sight of traditional propeller wind turbines could be replaced in the future with wind farms containing more compact and efficient vertical turbines.

New research from Oxford Brookes University has found that the vertical turbine design is far more efficient than traditional turbines in large-scale wind farms, and when set in pairs the vertical turbines increase each other’s performance by up to 15%.

A research team from the School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (ECM) at Oxford Brookes led by Professor Iakovos Tzanakis conducted an in-depth study using more than 11500 hours of computer simulation to show that wind farms can perform more efficiently by substituting the traditional propeller-type Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWTs), for compact Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (VAWTs).