NASA just landed a spacecraft on an asteroid and, if everything went as planned, sucked up a sample of dust and rock from the surface.
From 200 million miles away, NASA and its engineering partner, Lockheed Martin, instructed the spacecraft to descend to the surface of a space rock called Bennu.
In just 5 to 10 seconds, the probe should have collected samples from the asteroid’s surface. It’s set to bring these pieces of Bennu back to Earth later.
A group of scientists at Northeastern University are making progress using nanotechnology to prevent, diagnose and fight the coronavirus.
Thomas Webster, professor of chemical engineering at Northeastern University, has been working with nanotechnology for decades. Now, he and his team are finding new applications with the coronavirus.
The company aims to raise NOK100 million by going public. It will use the funds to expand its overseas operation and reinforce engineering resources in Norway.
Norwegian floating PV specialist Ocean Sun is seeking a listing on the Merkur Market, a multilateral trading facility which has offered small and medium-sized companies access to the Oslo Stock Exchange since 2016.
The company aims to raise NOK100 million ($10.9 million) through the initial public offering. “The funding round is necessary in order for Ocean Sun to expand its operation abroad but also to reinforce local engineering resources in Norway,” Ocean Sun CEO Børge Bjørneklett told pv magazine. “We are involved in several demonstration projects but since they are relatively small we don’t make sufficient revenue yet and we need external financing to progress faster and stronger.”
The net proceeds will also be used for research and development, working capital and general corporate purposes, according to the company.
In this episode, we’re tackling the question that’s on everyone’s minds: what will it take to have quantum internet in our home?
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A quantum internet is in the works.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently rolled out a blueprint describing research goals and engineering barriers on the way to quantum internet.
The DOE’s latest blueprint for a quantum internet in the U.S. has four key milestones. The first is to make sure quantum information sent over current fiber optic cables is secure. Then to establish entangled networks across colleges or cities, then throughout states, and finally for the whole country.
But what exactly is quantum internet? There is no real clear meaning beyond “sending quantum signals back and forth,” and there are a few ways to go about doing it.
In February 2020, the Department of Energy announced they had sent two entangled photons over two separate 42 kilometer fiber optic loops and had verified they were still correlated when they returned. They hailed it as a milestone on the way to developing a national quantum internet.
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have significantly boosted the output from a system that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions, using heat from the sun or another source.
The system, which builds on a design initially developed three years ago at MIT by members of the same team, brings the process closer to something that could become a practical water source for remote regions with limited access to water and electricity. The findings are described today in the journal Joule, in a paper by Professor Evelyn Wang, who is head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; graduate student Alina LaPotin; and six others at MIT and in Korea and Utah.
The earlier device demonstrated by Wang and her co-workers provided a proof of concept for the system, which harnesses a temperature difference within the device to allow an adsorbent material — which collects liquid on its surface — to draw in moisture from the air at night and release it the next day. When the material is heated by sunlight, the difference in temperature between the heated top and the shaded underside makes the water release back out of the adsorbent material. The water then gets condensed on a collection plate.
Freeze laser.
We demonstrate ground-state cooling of a trapped ion using radio-frequency (rf) radiation. This is a powerful tool for the implementation of quantum operations, where rf or microwave radiation instead of lasers is used for motional quantum state engineering. We measure a mean phonon number of $\overline{n}=0.13$ after sideband cooling, corresponding to a ground-state occupation probability of 88%. After preparing in the vibrational ground state, we demonstrate motional state engineering by driving Rabi oscillations between the $|n=0⟩$ and $|n=1⟩$ Fock states. We also use the ability to ground-state cool to accurately measure the motional heating rate and report a reduction by almost 2 orders of magnitude compared with our previously measured result, which we attribute to carefully eliminating sources of electrical noise in the system.
Compressing simple molecular solids with hydrogen at extremely high pressures, University of Rochester engineers and physicists have, for the first time, created material that is superconducting at room temperature.
Featured as the cover story in the journal Nature, the work was conducted by the lab of Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of physics and mechanical engineering.
Dias says developing materials that are superconducting—without electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic field at room temperature—is the “holy grail” of condensed matter physics. Sought for more than a century, such materials “can definitely change the world as we know it,” Dias says.
Today, the Department of Defense announced $600 million in awards for 5G experimentation and testing at five U.S. military test sites, representing the largest full-scale 5G tests for dual-use applications in the world. Each installation will partner military Services, industry leaders, and academic experts to advance the Department’s 5G capabilities. Projects will include piloting 5G-enabled augmented/virtual reality for mission planning and training, testing 5G-enabled Smart Warehouses, and evaluating 5G technologies to enhance distributed command and control.
“The Department of Defense is at the forefront of cutting edge 5G testing and experimentation, which will strengthen our Nation’s warfighting capabilities as well as U.S. economic competitiveness in this critical field. Through these test sites, the Department is leveraging its unique authorities to pursue bold innovation at a scale and scope unmatched anywhere else in the world. Importantly, today’s announcement demonstrates the Department’s commitment to exploring the vast potential applications and dual-use opportunities that can be built upon next-generation networks,” said Michael Kratsios, Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.
The test sites include: Hill Air Force Base, Utah; Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington; Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany, Georgia; Naval Base San Diego, California; and Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, Nevada.
A team of researchers led by Osaka University discovers “microtube implosion,” a novel mechanism that demonstrates the generation of megatesla-order magnetic fields.
Magnetic fields are used in various areas of modern physics and engineering, with practical applications ranging from doorbells to maglev trains. Since Nikola Tesla’s discoveries in the 19th century, researchers have strived to realize strong magnetic fields in laboratories for fundamental studies and diverse applications, but the magnetic strength of familiar examples are relatively weak. Geomagnetism is 0.3−0.5 gauss (G) and magnetic tomography (MRI) used in hospitals is about 1 tesla (T = 104 G). By contrast, future magnetic fusion and maglev trains will require magnetic fields on the kilotesla (kT = 107 G) order. To date, the highest magnetic fields experimentally observed are on the kT order.
Recently, scientists at Osaka University discovered a novel mechanism called a “microtube implosion,” and demonstrated the generation of megatesla (MT = 1010 G) order magnetic fields via particle simulations using a supercomputer. Astonishingly, this is three orders of magnitude higher than what has ever been achieved in a laboratory. Such high magnetic fields are expected only in celestial bodies like neutron stars and black holes.
