Lifeboat Foundation

In a move that echoes a sci-fi series, researchers have developed a super-small material that was able to not only stimulate nerves in rodents, but reconnect them as well. The finding could lead to injectable particles that take the place of larger implants.

In creating the particles, researchers at Rice University started with two layers of a metallic glass alloy called Metglas and wedged a piezoelectric layer of lead zirconium titanate in between them. Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when they have mechanical forces applied to them. Metglas is a magnetostrictive material, which means it changes its shape when it has a magnetic field applied to it. In this case, the change in shape of the Metglas in the presence of magnetic pulses caused the piezoelectric material inside to generate an electrical signal. Materials that do this are known as magnetoelectric.

“We asked, ‘Can we create a material that can be like dust or is so small that by placing just a sprinkle of it inside the body you’d be able to stimulate the brain or nervous system?’” said lead author Joshua Chen, a Rice doctoral alumnus. “With that question in mind, we thought that magnetoelectric materials were ideal candidates for use in neurostimulation. They respond to magnetic fields, which easily penetrate into the body, and convert them into electric fields – a language our nervous system already uses to relay information.”

The Higgs field is famous for its role bestowing mass on other particles. But it isn’t a one-way relationship: The Higgs field’s interactions also influence its own particle, the Higgs boson. Due to this give-and-take, some physicists think the Higgs boson should be approximately as heavy as the biggest mass scale with which it interacts, the Planck scale.

But this isn’t the case. The Planck scale sits at the enormous energies at which it is thought that gravity becomes as strong as the other three fundamental forces, around 10¹⁹ gigaelectronvolts. This is many orders of magnitude bigger than the actual Higgs mass of 125 GeV.

How can the gap between expectation and reality be so huge? Is something protecting the Higgs from Planck-scale physics? The large, unexpected difference in these two scales is known as the hierarchy problem.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, but sometimes it would be nice to have known the outcomes before making a choice. This is as true in day-to-day life as it is in quantum mechanics. But it seems that the quantum world has something we do not have: a way to alter yesterday’s choices today, before they become tomorrow’s mistakes.

None of this is real time-travel. Physicists remain skeptical about that possibility. However, it is possible to simulate a closed time-loop with quantum mechanics, thanks to the property of entanglement. When two particles are entangled, they are in a single state even if they are separated by huge distances. A change to one is a change to the other, and this happens instantaneously.

So a particle can be prepared for an experiment, entangled, and sent to the experiment. Then scientists can modify its entangled companion, changing the way the particle in the experiment behaves.

“The surprising thing we found is that in a particular kind of crystal lattice, where electrons become stuck, the strongly coupled behavior of electrons in d atomic orbitals actually act like the f orbital systems of some heavy fermions,” said Qimiao Si, co-author of a study about the research in Science Advances

<em> Science Advances </em> is a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal that is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It was launched in 2015 and covers a wide range of topics in the natural sciences, including biology, chemistry, earth and environmental sciences, materials science, and physics.

Eclipses can be more than just emotionally stirring. Solar eclipses, when they happen, create waves of disturbances across electrically charged particles in the Earth’s ionosphere—a layer of the upper atmosphere that plays an important role in radio frequency communications. Here, the heated and charged ions and electrons swirl around in a soup of plasma that envelops the planet.

To understand the effect that eclipses have on this plasma, scientists from NASA are planning to shoot a series of 60-feet-tall rockets up to collect information at the source.

The ionosphere sits between 60–300 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, which is roughly 37–190 miles up. “The only way to study between 50 kilometers and 300 kilometers in situ is through rockets,” says Aroh Barjatya, director of the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab and principal investigator on the upcoming NASA sounding rocket mission, which is called Atmospheric Perturbations around the Eclipse Path. By in situ, he means quite literally in the thick of it.

A team of atmospheric scientists, chemists and infectious disease specialists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamical Systems, the University of Denver, Georg August University and St. Petersburg State University, has embarked on an effort to collate publicly available information on droplet properties, such as the way they are distributed by size, their composition, and the ways they are emitted, as a means of helping to develop mitigation strategies for fighting infectious agents.

In their paper published in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics, the group describes their collating process and why they believe it could help fight non-contact infectious diseases.

In the early days of the pandemic, as people around the world locked themselves inside their residences, scientists, including those not in the medical field, looked for ways to help. One such pair of researchers, Christopher Pöhlker, an atmospheric scientist, and his wife, Mira, a cloud scientist, began to wonder about the nature of droplet size—something related to both their fields of work.

This study reports gates between qubits encoded in the nuclear spin state of Yb atoms trapped in optical tweezers, reaching very high fidelity and demonstrating mid-circuit conversion of errors into erasure errors.

From unexplained tracks in a balloon-borne experiment to cosmic rays on Earth, the unstable muon was particle physics’ biggest surprise.

With the successful development of the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, which makes use of 255 detected photons, China continues to hold a world-leading position in the field of quantum computer research and development, lead scientists for the program told the Global Times on Wednesday.

The research team, composed of renowned quantum physicists Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, announced the successful construction of a 255-photon-based prototype quantum computer named Jiuzhang 3.0 early Wednesday morning.

The quantum computing feat accomplished by the team of talents achieves a speed that is 10 quadrillion times faster in solving Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) problems compared with the world’s fastest supercomputers.