Herbs treating Tuberculosis.
A centuries-old herbal medicine, discovered by Chinese scientists and used to effectively treat malaria, may help treat tuberculosis and slow the evolution of drug resistance.
A new study shows the ancient remedy artemisinin stopped the ability of TB-causing bacteria, known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, to become dormant. This stage of the disease often makes the use of antibiotics ineffective.
The study is published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology.
Oh; there is a LOT more to they syndiamond story as it relates to some of the additional hardware and communications technologies that we’re developing and planning for the future.
What are the unique properties of diamond that make it a supermaterial?
Diamond has long been known to have exceptional properties, largely resulting from the symmetry of the cubic lattice made of light carbon atoms connected by extremely strong bonds. These exceptional properties include thermal conductivity five times higher than that of copper and the widest optical transparency of any material extending from the UV to the RF part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Additionally, diamond also has some interesting chemical properties as it is extremely inert, though it can become a conductor by adding boron. In this manner, one could leverage synthetic diamond for use in electrochemical incineration where existing electrode materials have only a limited lifetime.
What are the traditional applications for synthetic diamond in engineering and electronics?
Researchers used nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots to convert carbon dioxide into liquid hydrocarbons like ethylene and ethanol for use as fuel.
The wonder material known as graphene may have a new trick up its sleeve: converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuels. A team of researchers at Rich University in Texas used nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots (NGQDs) as a catalyst in electrochemical reactions that create ethylene and ethanol, and the stability and efficiency of the material is close to common electrocatalysts such as copper.
In the fight to slow climate change, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere is crucial, and plenty of research is looking into how we can capture carbon at the source, using clay, engineered bacteria, metal-organic frameworks, or materials like the “Memzyme” and sequester it into rock and concrete. Other studies are focusing on converting the captured carbon into liquid hydrocarbons, which can be used as fuel.
For the first time, MIT physicists have observed a highly ordered crystal of electrons in a semiconducting material and documented its melting, much like ice thawing into water. The observations confirm a fundamental phase transition in quantum mechanics that was theoretically proposed more than 80 years ago but not experimentally documented until now.
The team, led by MIT professor of physics Raymond Ashoori and his postdoc Joonho Jang, used a spectroscopy technique developed in Ashoori’s group. The method relies on electron “tunneling,” a quantum mechanical process that allows researchers to inject electrons at precise energies into a system of interest—in this case, a system of electrons trapped in two dimensions. The method uses hundreds of thousands of short electrical pulses to probe a sheet of electrons in a semiconducting material cooled to extremely low temperatures, just above absolute zero.
With their tunneling technique, the researchers shot electrons into the supercooled material to measure the energy states of electrons within the semiconducting sheet. Against a background blur, they detected a sharp spike in the data. After much analysis, they determined that the spike was the precise signal that would be given off from a highly ordered crystal of electrons vibrating in unison.
Nice.
Using their advanced atomic clock to mimic other desirable quantum systems, JILA physicists have caused atoms in a gas to behave as if they possess unusual magnetic properties long sought in harder-to-study solid materials. Representing a novel “off-label” use for atomic clocks, the research could lead to the creation of new materials for applications such as “spintronic” devices and quantum computers.
JILA’s record-setting atomic clock, in which strontium atoms are trapped in a laser grid known as an optical lattice, turns out to be an excellent model for the magnetic behavior of crystalline solids at the atomic scale. Such models are valuable for studying the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics.
To create “synthetic” magnetic fields, the JILA team locked together two properties of the clock atoms to create a quantum phenomenon known as spin-orbit coupling. The long lifetime and precision control of the clock atoms enabled researchers to overcome a common problem in other gas-based spin-orbit coupling experiments, namely heating and loss of atoms due to spontaneous changes in atomic states, which interferes with the effects researchers are trying to achieve.
Doesn’t pay to fraud the government. The real question is why it took so long (4 years).
Defendant submitted false data and information instead of building and testing experimental components
OAKLAND – S. Darin Kinion, Ph.D., was sentenced today to 18 months’ imprisonment for submitting false data and reports to defraud the United States in connection with a quantum computing research program announced United States Attorney Brian J. Stretch, U.S. Department of Energy Special Agent in Charge of the Office of the Inspector General Scott Berenberg, and Inspector General of the Intelligence Community I. Charles McCullough III. The sentence follows a guilty plea entered June 14, 2016, in which Kinion acknowledged submitting false data and reports to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (“IARPA”) of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in a scheme to defraud the government out of money intended to fund research.
According to his plea agreement, Kinion, 44, of Lafayette, Calif., admitted that between 2008 and 2012, he received millions of dollars of funding from IARPA to design, build, and test experimental components in the field of quantum computing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (“LLNL”). Nevertheless, rather than build and test the experimental components, Kinion presented to the government false and fraudulent data and information in a scheme to defraud IARPA into thinking he had performed the work. In order to build and test the experimental components, Kinion would have had to set up and operate certain equipment. Kinion requested funds from IARPA to purchase the equipment, claimed he had used the equipment successfully to build and test experimental components, and submitted reports and information in support of these claims. Kinion, however, never setup nor operated the equipment.
UM NOVO RELATÓRIO da Casa Branca alerta que milhões de postos de trabalho podem ser automatizado e deixar de existir nos próximos anos.
O relatório, publicado esta semana pelo Conselho de Assessores Econômicos do presidente, se junta a um crescente corpo de trabalho prevendo enormes perdas de empregos devido à automação e inteligência artificial.
Researchers have developed a new type of light-enhancing optical cavity that is only 200 nanometers tall and 100 nanometers across. Their new nanoscale system represents a step toward brighter single-photon sources, which could help propel quantum-based encryption and a truly secure and future-proofed network.
Quantum encryption techniques, which are seen as likely to be central to future data encryption methods, use individual photons as an extremely secure way to encode data. A limitation of these techniques has been the ability to emit photons at high rates. “One of the most important figures of merit for single-photon sources is brightness—or collected photons per second—because the brighter it is, the more data you can transmit securely with quantum encryption,” said Yousif Kelaita, Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab, Stanford University, California.
In the journal Optical Materials Express, Kelaita and his colleagues show that their new nanocavity significantly increased the emission brightness of quantum dots—nanometer-scale semiconductor particles that can emit single photons.
