Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists examine how friction forces propel development in a marine organism. As the potter works the spinning wheel, the friction between their hands and the soft clay helps them shape it into all kinds of forms and creations. In a fascinating parallel, sea squirt oocytes (immature egg cells) harness friction within various compartments in their interior to undergo developmental changes after conception. A study from the Heisenberg group at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Nature Physics, now describes how this works.

New Compounds for Organometallic Chemistry – Sandwich Complexes in the Form of Rings Are Kept Together by Their Own Energy.

Sandwich compounds are special chemical compounds used as basic building blocks in organometallic chemistry. So far, their structure has always been linear. Recently, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Marburg were the first to make stacked sandwich complexes form a nano-sized ring. Physical and other properties of these cyclocene structures will now be further investigated.

Evolution of Sandwich Complexes.

Fusion’s success as a renewable energy depends on the creation of an industry to support it, and academia is vital to that industry’s development.

A new study suggests that universities have an essential role to fulfill in the continued growth and success of any modern high-tech industry, and especially the nascent fusion industry; however, the importance of that role is not reflected in the number of fusion-oriented faculty and educational channels currently available. Academia’s responsiveness to the birth of other modern scientific fields, such as aeronautics and nuclear fission, provides a template for the steps universities can take to enable a robust fusion industry.

Insights from Experts.

A study led by the University of Oxford has used the power of machine learning to overcome a key challenge affecting quantum devices. For the first time, the findings reveal a way to close the “reality gap”: the difference between predicted and observed behavior from quantum devices. The results have been published in Physical Review X.

Quantum computing could supercharge a wealth of applications, from climate modeling and financial forecasting to drug discovery and artificial intelligence. But this will require effective ways to scale and combine individual quantum devices (also called qubits). A major barrier against this is inherent variability, where even apparently identical units exhibit different behaviors.

Functional variability is presumed to be caused by nanoscale imperfections in the materials from which quantum devices are made. Since there is no way to measure these directly, this internal disorder cannot be captured in simulations, leading to the gap in predicted and observed outcomes.

In recent years, engineers have developed a wide range of robotic systems that could soon assist humans with various everyday tasks. Rather than assisting with chores or other manual jobs, some of these robots could merely act as companions, helping older adults or individuals with different disabilities to practice skills that typically entail interacting with another human.

Researchers at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan recently developed a new robot that can play video games with a human user. This robot, introduced in a paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, can play games with users while communicating with them.

“We have been developing robots that can chat while watching TV together, and interaction technology that creates empathy, in order to realize a partner robot that can live together with people in their daily life,” Masayuki Kanbara, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “In this paper, we developed a robot that plays TV games together to provide opportunities for people to interact with the robot in their daily lives.”

Jan 9 (Reuters) — Microsoft (MSFT.O) has worked with a U.S. national laboratory to use artificial intelligence to rapidly identify a material that could mean producing batteries that require 70% less lithium than now, the company said on Tuesday.

The replacement of much of the lithium with sodium, a common element found in table salt, still needs extensive evaluation by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington to determine whether it will be suitable for mass production.

“Something that could have taken years, we did in two weeks,” Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft, told Reuters. “That’s the part we’re most excited about. … We just picked one problem. There are thousands of problems to go solve, and it’s applicable to all of them.”

Using a spectral synthesis code designed to simulate conditions in interstellar matter, astronomers have explored a faint tidal disruption event (TDE) designated iPTF16fnl. Results of the study, published Dec. 29 on the pre-print server arXiv, deliver important insights into the properties of this TDE.

TDEs are astronomical phenomena that occur when a star passes close enough to a supermassive black hole and is pulled apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, causing the process of disruption. Such tidally-disrupted stellar debris starts raining down on the black hole and radiation emerges from the innermost region of accreting debris, which is an indicator of the presence of a TDE. All in all, the debris stream-stream collision causes an energy dissipation, which may lead to the formation of an accretion disk.

Therefore, TDEs are perceived by astronomers as potentially important probes of strong gravity and accretion physics, providing answers about the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes.

After a decade studying thousands of supernovae, astronomers are still perplexed by the enigma that led Einstein to his ‘greatest mistake’

Scientists overcame a limitation in graphene to harness the material as a working semiconductor at terahertz frequencies with 10 times the mobility of silicon.