Lifeboat Foundation

The continuous improvement of circuits and electronic components is vital for the development of new technologies with enhanced capabilities and unique characteristics. In recent years, most electronics engineers have been specifically focusing on reducing the size of transistors, while retaining a low power consumption.

Researchers at University of Science and Technology Beijing recently introduced a new pseudo-CMOS architecture based on self-biased molybdenum disulfide transistors. This architecture, outlined in Nature Electronics, could be used to create highly performing inverters, gate circuits, and other device components.

“The development of integrated circuits (ICs) for efficient computing with low power is a global hot topic and a focus of international competition in cutting-edge fields,” Zheng Zhang, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

Elon Musk says Tesla’s real-world simulation and video generation are the best in the world, following OpenAI’s launch of the Sora model.

A European Space Agency satellite is expected to reenter and largely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

The agency’s Space Debris Office, along with an international surveillance network, is monitoring and tracking the Earth-observing ERS-2 satellite, which is predicted to make its reentry at 3:53 p.m. ET Wednesday, with a 7.5-hour window of uncertainty. The ESA is also providing live updates on its website.

“As the spacecraft’s reentry is ‘natural’, without the possibility to perform manoeuvers, it is impossible to know exactly where and when it will reenter the atmosphere and begin to burn up,” according to a statement from the agency.

A multi-institutional team of Chinese engineers has developed a proof-of-concept calcium-based battery that withstands 700 charge cycles at room temperature. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes the challenges they addressed in developing the battery and what they have learned about the possible use of calcium-based batteries in consumer products in the future.

The current standard for rechargeable batteries used in consumer products is lithium. But because it is a rare material and has issues such as poor aging and the need to prevent overcharge, scientists have been looking for a suitable replacement. One such material is calcium, which is 2,500 times as abundant as lithium.

Prior research has suggested rechargeable batteries based on calcium should be possible if problems can be resolved. One of the biggest challenges is finding suitable electrolyte and electrode materials that can provide stability and safety.

A combination of battery technology and catalysis opens new avenues for cheap, high-capacity batteries. Lithium-sulfur batteries can potentially store five to 10 times more energy than current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries at much lower cost. Current lithium-ion batteries use cobalt oxide as the cathode, an expensive mineral mined in ways that harm people and the environment. Lithium-sulfur batteries replace cobalt oxide with sulfur, which is abundant and cheap, costing less than one-hundredth the price of cobalt.

But there’s a catch: Chemical reactions, particularly the sulfur reduction reaction, are very complex and not well understood, and undesired side reactions could end the batteries’ lives well before those of traditional batteries.

Now, researchers led by UCLA chemists Xiangfeng Duan and Philippe Sautet have deciphered the key pathways of this reaction.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

Once hypothetical monsters born in a tangled nest of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, black holes are now recognized as bona fide celestial objects as real as stars, moons, and galaxies.

But make no mistake. Their engines are still as mysterious as they were when the German theoretical physicist Karl Schwarzschild first played with Einstein’s field equations and came to the conclusion that space and time could pucker up into pits of no return.

Goethe University Frankfurt physicists Daniel Jampolski and Luciano Rezzolla have gone back to step one in an attempt to make better sense of the equations that describe black holes and have come away with a solution that’s easier to picture, if no less bizarre.

Eye contact and body language are critical in social interaction, but exactly how the brain uses this information in order to inform behavior in real time is not well understood.

By combining behavioral and wireless eye tracking and neural monitoring, a team of Rice University scientists and collaborators studied how pairs of freely moving macaques interacting in a naturalistic setting use visual cues to guide complex, goal-oriented cooperative behavior. The study published in Nature offers first evidence that the part of the brain that processes visual information ⎯ the visual cortex ⎯ plays an active role in social behavior by providing an executive area ⎯ the prefrontal cortex ⎯ with the signals necessary to generate the decision to cooperate.

We are the first to use telemetric devices to record neural activity from multiple cortical populations in the visual and prefrontal cortex while animals explore their environment and interact with one another. When primates, including humans, interact, we make eye contact and use body language to indicate to conspecifics what we want to do.

Summary: Researchers unlocked how the brain processes melodies, creating a detailed map of auditory cortex activity. Their study reveals that the brain engages in dual tasks when hearing music: tracking pitch with neurons used for speech and predicting future notes with music-specific neurons.

This breakthrough clarifies the longstanding mystery of melody perception, demonstrating that some neural processes for music and speech are shared, while others are uniquely musical. The discovery enhances our understanding of the brain’s complex response to music and opens avenues for exploring music’s emotional and therapeutic impacts.