Lifeboat Foundation

The future of technology has an age-old problem: rust. When iron-containing metal reacts with oxygen and moisture, the resulting corrosion greatly impedes the longevity and use of parts in the automotive industry. While it’s not called “rust” in the semiconductor industry, oxidation is especially problematic in two-dimensional (2D) semiconductor materials, which control the flow of electricity in electronic devices, because any corrosion can render the atomic-thin material useless. Now, a team of academic and enterprise researchers has developed a synthesis process to produce a “rust-resistant” coating with additional properties ideal for creating faster, more durable electronics.

The team, co-led by researchers at Penn State, published their work in Nature Communications (“Tailoring amorphous boron nitride for high-performance two-dimensional electronics”).

These materials are made from molybdenum disulfide, a two-dimensional semiconductor, grown on a sapphire surface. The triangular shapes seen are aligned because of a special process called epitaxy, where the material follows the pattern of the surface it’s grown on. Insulating layers, like amorphous boron nitride, are added during the process of making these ultra-thin materials, which are used to build next-generation electronic devices. (Image: J.A. Robinson Research Group/Penn State)

Could slight wobbles in the orbit of Mars be caused by microscopic black holes that have existed since the Big Bang? This is what a recent study published in Physical Review D hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and UC Santa Cruz investigated how these miniscule black holes could be comprised of dark matter, which was first hypothesized in the 1970s, resulting in miniscule wobbles in the orbit of Mars. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the characteristics of dark matter, which remains one of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe.

“Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimeters,” said Dr. David Kaiser, who is a professor of physics and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT, and a co-author on the study. “We’re taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect. If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years.”

For the study, the researchers began with handwritten calculations produced by Tung X. Tran, who eventually became the study’s lead author and is a graduate student at Stanford University, which calculated the results if a primordial black hole passed through a human body, which he calculated would push the person approximately 20 feet.

There is growing evidence of the effectiveness of Shampoo, a higher-order preconditioning method, over Adam in deep learning optimization tasks.

However, Shampoo’s drawbacks include additional hyperparameters and computational overhead when compared to Adam, which only updates running averages of…

SOAP: Improving and Stabilizing Shampoo using Adam.

Continue reading “Nikhilvyas/SOAP” »

What violent galaxy smashups may have wrought across the universe.

A team of scientists has unlocked the potential of 6G communications with a new polarization multiplexer. Terahertz communications represent the next frontier in wireless technology, promising data transmission rates far exceeding current systems.

By operating at terahertz frequencies, these systems can support unprecedented bandwidth, enabling ultra-fast wireless communication and data transfer. However, one of the significant challenges in terahertz communications is effectively managing and utilizing the available spectrum.

The team has developed the first ultra-wideband integrated terahertz polarization (de)multiplexer implemented on a substrateless silicon base which they have successfully tested in the sub-terahertz J-band (220–330 GHz) for 6G communications and beyond.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common cause of illness-based death throughout the world. According to the World Health Organization, CAD causes 17.9 million deaths per year worldwide, nearly one-third of all illness-based deaths annually.

Coronary angiography is currently the best method of confirming a CAD diagnosis, but it is expensive and invasive, poses risks to patients, and is not suitable for early diagnosis and assessing disease risk.

Seeking a safer, lower-cost and more efficient diagnostic method, a research team from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Life Science, and Hunan University of Chinese Medicine’s School of Traditional Chinese Medicine has used artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a diagnostic algorithm based on tongue imaging. Their work is published in Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarrollBlog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/09/23…

CNBC’s Steve Kovach joins ‘Squawk Box’ with the latest news.

University of Florida horticulture science professor Rob Ferl is going where some men have gone before, including William Shatner and Jeff Bezos, but he’s bringing along some experimental plant life for NASA.

Ferl, a researcher within UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, is also the director of UF’s new Astraeus Space Institute. He is joining five other people on the launch of Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket today for what will be its eighth human spaceflight. Dubbed NS-26, the capsule is set for liftoff as early as 9:00 a.m. EDT from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch facility.

Along for the ride will be a species of plant called Arabidopsis thaliana. Ferl will be looking at how its genes adapt on the way to space.