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The proton, that little positively-charged nugget inside an atom, is fractions of a quadrillionth of a meter smaller than anyone thought, according to new research appearing Nov. 7 in Nature.

In work they hope solves the contentious “proton radius puzzle” that has been roiling some corners of physics in the last decade, a team of scientists including Duke physicist Haiyan Gao have addressed the question of the proton’s radius in a new way and discovered that it is 0.831 femtometers across, which is about 4 percent smaller than the best previous measurement using electrons from accelerators. (Read the paper!)

A single femtometer is 0.000000000000039370 inches imperial, if that helps, or think of it as a millionth part of a billionth part of a meter. And the new radius is just 80 percent of that.

Gotham City’s Dark Knight boasts an impressive collection of technological marvels, but the superhero scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have cutting-edge capabilities of their own.

A recent battery manufacturing project—affectionately called BatMan —has developed a novel laser patterning process to alter the microstructure of battery electrode materials. Funded by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, this project brings together expert minds from NREL, Clarios, Amplitude Laser Group, and Liminal Insights. This revolutionized manufacturing process could unlock significant improvements to electrified transportation, leading the charge toward a brighter and more sustainable future.

“BatMan builds on NREL’s expertise using laser ablation, advanced computational models, and materials characterization to address key challenges in battery manufacturing,” said Bertrand Tremolet de Villers, project co-lead and senior scientist in NREL’s Thin Film and Manufacturing Sciences group. “This new, high-throughput laser patterning process—demonstrated at scale with state-of-the-art roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques—uses laser pulses to quickly and precisely modify and optimize electrode structures, offering a massive leap in battery capabilities with minimal added manufacturing cost.”

A team of scientists had the opportunity to study the brain waves of a dying person — and found an increase in activity associated with memory and dreams.

I just saw this.

Dive into the world of Sora, OpenAI’s transformative AI, through our demonstration of its power to turn text prompts into rich videos. See the evolution of content creation and unlock the limitless potential with Sora’s advanced technology. More: https://retrofuturista.com/openai-sora/

Continue reading “OpenAI Sora in Action: Tokyo Walk” »

You could say it has put fundamental physics in a spin.

Is there a connection between cannabis use and binge eating? This is what a recent study published in Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the medical risks associated with cannabis use and binge eating, specifically the link between the two. This research marks only the third study conducted to make a connection between cannabis use and binge eating disorder and holds the potential for scientists, medical practitioners, and patients make better informed clinical decisions for treating binge eating.

“Distinguishing the relationship between cannabis use, eating disorder severity and other psychiatric symptoms in binge eating patients is necessary for informing screening and clinical recommendations,” said Megan Wilkinson, who is a PhD student in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study.

For the study, the researchers enlisted 165 participants who were pursuing medical treatment for binge eating and were asked to report both their cannabis and alcohol use as part of the survey. In the end, the researchers found that 23 percent of the participants had used cannabis within the prior three months. Additionally, the participants were also found to have increased alcohol consumption, as well. In terms of the connection between cannabis use and binge eating, while the researcher concluded that cannabis use did not result in increased binge eating, they found the opposite in that binge eating could result in increased cannabis use, as noted by the 23 percent participants who reported using cannabis.

We’re teaching #AII to understand and simulate the physical world in #motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

A head injury serious enough to affect brain function, such as that caused by a car accident or sudden fall, leads to changes in the brain beyond the site of impact, Tufts University School of Medicine scientists report in the journal Cerebral Cortex. In an animal model of traumatic brain injury, the researchers found that both hemispheres work together to forge new neural pathways in an attempt to replicate those that were lost.

“Even areas far away from the injury behaved differently immediately afterward,” says first author Samantha Bottom-Tanzer, an MD/Ph. D. student in neuroscience at the School of Medicine. “Traumatic brain injury research tends to focus on the region of injury, but this study makes a good case that the entire brain can be affected, and imaging in distal regions can provide valuable information.”

Bottom-Tanzer and colleagues are the first to use an imaging technique combining fluorescent sensors of neuronal activity and electrodes to record how many parts of the brain talk to each other after a brain injury. The team tracked neural activity in mice for up to three weeks post-injury during periods of exercise and rest.

A U.S. company’s 14-foot-tall spacecraft began speeding to the moon, where the vehicle is expected to try to make history by pulling off the first-ever commercial lunar landing.

The lander, called Odysseus and developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, isn’t carrying crew, but rather is ferrying scientific and commercial payloads. It was launched at 1:05 a.m. ET Thursday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX rocket and later separated from the upper part of that vehicle to start a roughly 239,000-mile journey, according to a livestream.

The spacecraft had a successful launch and connected to radio communications with the company’s mission operations center in Houston, Intuitive Machines said.