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Category: physics – Page 300

A test cell for the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade with tokamak in the center. (credit: Elle Starkman/PPPL Office of Communications)

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are building a “star in a jar” — a miniature version of the how our Sun creates energy through fusion. It could provide humankind with near limitless energy, ending dependence on fossil fuels for generating electricity — without contributing greenhouse gases that warm the Earth, and with no long-term radioactive waste.

But that requires a “jar” that can contain superhot plasma — and is low-cost enough to be built around the world. A model for such a “jar,” or fusion device, already exists in experimental form: the tokamak, or fusion reactor. Invented in the 1950s by Soviet physicists, it’s a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma (superhot charged gas) in the shape of a torus.

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New research published in the New Journal of Physics tries to decompose the structural layers of the cortical network to different hierarchies enabling to identify the network’s nucleus, from which our consciousness could emerge.

The is a very complex network, with approximately 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses between the neurons. In order to cope with its enormous complexity and to understand how brain function eventually creates the conscious mind, science uses advanced mathematical tools. Ultimately, scientists want to understand how a global phenomenon such as consciousness can emerge from our neuronal network.

A team of physicists from Bar Ilan University in Israel led by Professor Shlomo Havlin and Professor Reuven Cohen used network theory in order to deal with this complexity and to determine how the structure of the human cortical network can support complex data integration and . The gray area of the human cortex, the neuron cell bodies, were scanned with MRI imaging and used to form 1000 in the cortical network. The white matter of the human cortex, the neuron bundles, were scanned with DTI imaging, forming 15,000 links or edges that connected the network’s nodes. In the end of this process, their network was an approximation of the structure of the human cortex.

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A team of Russian physicists has found a way to tune silicon nanoparticles so they can process optical data at previously unattainable speed, paving the way for the creation of “ultracompact and ultrafast” processing devices.

The findings of the experiment-based survey conducted by scientists from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and ITMO University were published in the ACS Photonics journal in late July.

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It would provide humankind with near limitless energy, ending dependence on fossil fuels for generating electricity.

US Government physicists have backed plans to create ‘a star in a jar’ — replicating on Earth the way the sun and stars create energy through fusion.

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) revealed their plan for a next generation fusion device in a paper published in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

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Astronomers have today confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting the sun’s nearest neighbour, Proxima Centauri, which has the potential to host liquid water, and therefore life.

The exoplanet in question, Proxima b, is thought to be the Earth’s closest potentially habitable neighbour, making this discovery a major landmark in humanity’s exploration of the universe.

“We’ve found an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri. It’s the nearest exoplanet we will ever find, because it’s the nearest star to the Sun, and we are very excited about it,” explained a delighted Dr Guillem Anglada-Escudé, from the School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary, University of London, who participated in the epic research project.

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Congrats Hong Kong Univ.

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have fabricated microscopically-small lasers directly on silicon, enabling the future-generation microprocessors to run faster and less power-hungry – a significant step towards light-based computing.

The innovation, made by Prof Kei-may Lau, Fang Professor of Engineering and Chair Professor of the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Barbara; Sandia National Laboratories and Harvard University, marks a major breakthrough for the semiconductor industry and well beyond.

Silicon forms the basis of everything from solar cells to the integrated circuits at the heart of our modern electronic gadgets. However, the crystal lattice of silicon and of typical laser materials could not match up, making it impossible to integrate the two materials until now, when Prof Lau’s group managed to integrate subwavelength cavities — the essential building blocks of their tiny lasers — onto silicon, allowing them to create and demonstrate high-density on-chip light-emitting elements. The finding was recently published as the cover story on Applied Physics Letters.

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