Lifeboat Foundation

But in the past few years, a climate change hero technology has made its way into electric vehicles, one that has improved—but not solved—their cold weather issues: heat pumps. Heat pumps transfer heat from outside the car to help keep passengers warm, and so avoid sucking too much power away from the battery. And yes, heat pumps can still bring warm air into the car even if it’s freezing outside, albeit with mixed success. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there is still a good amount of heat that can be drawn from air that’s, say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today, heat pumps come in many, but not all, new electric vehicles. Teslas have come with a proprietary heat pump tech since 2021. Jaguar’s I-Pace has one built in, as does BMW’s latest i-series cars, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Audi’s newest e-Tron, and Kia’s new electrified flagship, the EV9.

“Any electric vehicle that comes out right now and doesn’t have a heat pump is a dinosaur already,” says John Kelly, an automotive technology professor and instructor focusing on hybrid and electric vehicle technology at Weber State University.

Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed a cache of treasures—including more than 50 wooden sarcophagi, a funerary temple dedicated to an Old Kingdom queen and a 13-foot-long Book of the Dead scroll—at the Saqqara necropolis, a vast burial ground south of Cairo, according to a statement from the…

The team also discovered dozens of sarcophagi, wooden masks and ancient board games.

It has been known for more than century that increases in neural activity in the brain drive changes in local blood flow, known as neurovascular coupling. The colloquial explanation for these increases in blood flow (referred to as functional hyperemia) in the brain is that they serve to supply the needs of metabolically active neurons. However, there is an large body of evidence that is inconsistent with this idea. In most cases, baseline blood flow is adequate to supply even elevated neural activity. Neurovascular coupling is irregular, absent, or inverted in many brain regions, behavioral states, and conditions. Increases in respiration can generate increases in brain oxygenation independently of flow changes. Simulations have shown that areas with low blood flow are inescapable and cannot be removed by functional hyperemia given the architecture of the cerebral vasculature. What physiological purpose might neurovascular coupling serve? Here, we discuss potential alternative functions of neurovascular coupling. It may serve supply oxygen for neuromodulator synthesis, to regulate cerebral temperature, signal to neurons, stabilize and optimize the cerebral vascular structure, deal with the non-Newtonian nature of blood, or drive the production and circulation of cerebrospinal fluid around and through the brain via arterial dilations. Understanding the ‘why’ of neurovascular coupling is an important goal that give insight into the pathologies caused by cerebrovascular disfunction.

Like all energy demanding organs, the brain is highly vascularized. When presented with a sensory stimulus or cognitive task, increases in neural activity in many brain regions are accompanied by local dilation of arterioles and other microvessels, increasing local blood flow, volume and oxygenation. The increase in blood flow in response to increased neural activity (known as functional hyperemia) is controlled by a multitude of different signaling pathways via neurovascular coupling (reviewed in [1,2]). These vascular changes can be monitored non-invasively in humans and other species, with techniques (like BOLD fMRI) that are cornerstones in modern neuroscience [3,4]. Chronic disruptions of neurovascular coupling have adverse health effects on the brain. Stress affects neurovascular coupling [5,6], and many neurodegenerative diseases are marked by vascular dysfunction [7].

Scientists hoped that capturing a time-lapse from Mars could reveal cloud or dust devil activity, leading to insights about the weather on the planet. The images were taken while the rover was parked on Nov. 8, 2023, just over 4,000 sols – Martian days – into the mission.

Though the images did not reveal any weather anomalies, scientists did get a detailed look at the planet’s surface.

Topological photonics could impact the scalability of integrated photonics, but it has shown limited reconfigurability to date. Here, the authors demonstrate reprogrammable integrated photonics as a nearly universal platform for topological models.

Archaeologists measured the magnetic fields found in clay bricks to determine the construction date of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate.

Radar altimeters are the sole indicators of altitude above a terrain. Spectrally adjacent 5G cellular bands pose significant risks of jamming altimeters and impacting flight landing and takeoff. As wireless technology expands in frequency coverage and utilizes spatial multiplexing, similar detrimental radio-frequency (RF) interference becomes a pressing issue.

To address this interference, RF front ends with exceptionally low latency are crucial for industries like transportation, health care, and the military, where the timeliness of transmitted messages is critical. Future generations of wireless technologies will impose even more stringent latency requirements on RF front-ends due to increased data rate, carrier frequency, and user count.

Additionally, challenges arise from the physical movement of transceivers, resulting in time-variant mixing ratios between interference and signal-of-interest (SOI). This necessitates real-time adaptability in mobile wireless receivers to handle fluctuating interference, particularly when it carries safety-to-life critical information for navigation and autonomous driving, such as aircraft and ground vehicles.

Kim, SW., Wang, K., Chen, S. et al. On the dynamical stability of copper-doped lead apatite. npj Comput Mater 10, 16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-024-01206-9

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Quantum engineering, a dynamic discipline bridging the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and established engineering fields has developed significantly in the past few decades. Two-level systems such as superconducting quantum bits are the building blocks of quantum circuits. Qubits of this type are currently the most researched and used in quantum computing applications^1,2,3,4,5. The characteristics of the superconducting qubits such as eigen energies, non-linearity, coupling strengths etc. can be tailored easily by adjusting the design parameters^6,7. Qubits have large non-linearity, which makes it possible to selectively address and control them^1,3,7,8. This dynamic property makes superconducting qubits a strong candidate for plethora of applications. Other two-level microscopic quantum systems^{9,10,11,12,13,14} also have certain advantages and may be used in the future.

Quantum devices operate at low temperatures and require good isolation from external noises. Microwave devices, such as circulators and isolators, protect quantum circuits by unidirectionally routing the output signal, whilst simultaneously isolating noise from the output channel back to the quantum circuit. Their non-reciprocal character relies on the properties of ferrites^15,16,17. Ferrite-based non-reciprocal devices are bulky^15,16,17, and they cannot be positioned near the quantum circuit because they require strong magnetic fields. Although commercial ferrite based non-reciprocal devices harness high isolation and low insertion loss, their dependency on magnetic components limits the scalability of cryogenic quantum circuits^15,16,18,19. Various ferrite-free approaches based on non-linear behavior of artificial atoms¹⁶, dc superconducting quantum interference devices (dc-SQUID)^20,21, and arrays of Josephson junctions (JJ’s)^19,22,23,24, have been experimentally demonstrated and implemented. Recently, a circuit based on semiconductor mixers has been used to realize a compact microwave isolator, which the authors claim could be extended to an on-chip device using Josephson mixers, although the “on-chip” demonstration is not yet reported²⁵. Additionally, mesoscopic circulators exploiting the quantum Hall effect to break time-reversal symmetry of electrical transport in 2D systems are explored at a cost of larger magnetic fields deleterious to superconducting circuits^{18,26,27,28,29}. More recently, a passive on-chip circulator based on three Josephson elements operating in charge-sensitive regime was demonstrated³⁰. Such devices are frequently limited by their parameter regime, leaving them charge sensitive and therefore difficult to implement in a practical scenario. However, it is possible to mitigate the charge-sensitivity by carefully tuning the device parameters. Our device operates in a parameter regime that is not sensitive to charge fluctuations or charge parity switching, a fundamental requirement for any practical implementation, and requires small magnetic field. The reported device is a proof of concept (PoC), potentially useful in the applications relevant to microwave read-out components in the field of superconducting quantum circuits.

In this work, we present a robust and simple on-chip microwave diode demonstrating transmission rectification based on a superconducting flux qubit⁸. The concept of the device is shown in Fig. 1a. The flux qubit is inductively coupled to two superconducting resonators of different lengths with different coupling strengths. The design details are reported later in this section. Probing the qubit at the half-flux (degeneracy point) with one tone-spectroscopy, we observe identical patterns of transmission coefficient for signals propagating in the opposite directions, which are shifted by 5 dB in power. This shift indicates the non-reciprocal behaviour in our device, expressed in terms of transmission rectification ratio ® in this article. The origin of this effect is the non-linearity of the flux qubit, which controls the transmission coefficient of the whole structure.