Lifeboat Foundation

Titan’s ocean has a volume 12 times that of all Earth’s oceans, but it may be barren of life as we know it.

Researchers from RMIT University are using nanodiamonds to create smart textiles that can cool people down faster. Their study, published in the journal Polymers for Advanced Technologies, found fabric made from cotton coated with nanodiamonds, using a method called electrospinning, showed a reduction of 2–3°C during the cooling down process compared to untreated cotton.

They do this by drawing out body heat and releasing it from the fabric—a result of the incredible thermal conductivity of nanodiamonds.

Project lead and Senior Lecturer, Dr. Shadi Houshyar, said there was a big opportunity to use these insights to create new textiles for sportswear and even personal protective clothing, such as underlayers to keep fire fighters cool. The study also found nanodiamonds increased the UV protection of cotton, making it ideal for outdoor summer clothing.

Metasurfaces that use light to control currents at the nanoscale could enable ultrafast microelectronics and information science.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Tuesday that the dangers that keep him awake at night regarding artificial intelligence are the “very subtle societal misalignments” that could make the systems wreak havoc.

Sam Altman, speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai via a video call, reiterated his call for a body like the International Atomic Energy Agency to be created to oversee AI that’s likely advancing faster than the world expects.

“There’s some things in there that are easy to imagine where things really go wrong. And I’m not that interested in the killer robots walking on the street direction of things going wrong,” Altman said. “I’m much more interested in the very subtle societal misalignments where we just have these systems out in society and through no particular ill intention, things just go horribly wrong.”

The authors of a recent review published in Ageing Research Reviews summarize the research on epigenetic reprogramming and its potential as a rejuvenation therapy [1].

Aging leads to changes in the epigenome. Those changes can lead to alterations in gene regulation, affecting cellular homeostasis, and can play a role in age-associated phenotypes. Epigenetic modifications, the addition or removal of chemical groups to the DNA or DNA-associated proteins, have a profound impact on gene expression, tissue functions, and identity [2].

This review’s authors believe epigenetic reprogramming to be among the most currently promising interventions to stop or delay aging, potentially even reversing it at the cellular level. They believe that epigenetics are the basis of aging; therefore, being able to impact the epigenome would allow them to address multiple Hallmarks of Aging simultaneously.

Chirality fundamentally determines the electrical properties of CNTs and is therefore critical for the performance of CNT electronics. This Review summarizes approaches in controlling the global chirality distribution and local chirality junctions and discusses the progress in CNT electronics.

University of Pennsylvania engineers have developed a new chip that uses light waves, rather than electricity, to perform the complex math essential to training AI. The chip has the potential to radically accelerate the processing speed of computers while also reducing their energy consumption.

The silicon-photonic (SiPh) chip’s design is the first to bring together Benjamin Franklin Medal Laureate and H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor Nader Engheta’s pioneering research in manipulating materials at the nanoscale to perform mathematical computations using light—the fastest possible means of communication—with the SiPh platform, which uses silicon, the cheap, abundant element used to mass-produce computer chips.

The interaction of light waves with matter represents one possible avenue for developing computers that supersede the limitations of today’s chips, which are essentially based on the same principles as chips from the earliest days of the computing revolution in the 1960s.

Semiconductor devices are small components that manage the movement of electrons in contemporary electronic gadgets. They are essential for powering a wide range of high-tech products, including cell phones, laptops, and vehicle sensors, as well as cutting-edge medical devices. However, the presence of material impurities or variations in temperature can interfere with electron flow, causing instability.

But now, theoretical and experimental physicists from the Würzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence ct.qmat—Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter have developed a semiconductor device from aluminum-gallium-arsenide (AlGaAs). This device’s electron flow, usually susceptible to interference, is safeguarded by a topological quantum phenomenon. This groundbreaking research was recently detailed in the esteemed journal Nature Physics.

“Thanks to the topological skin effect, all of the currents between the different contacts on the quantum semiconductor are unaffected by impurities or other external perturbations. This makes topological devices increasingly appealing for the semiconductor industry. They eliminate the need for the extremely high levels of material purity that currently drive up the costs of electronics manufacturing,” explains Professor Jeroen van den Brink, director of the Institute for Theoretical Solid State Physics at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden (IFW) and a principal investigator of ct.qmat.

A team of scientists from the University of Ottawa is offering insights into the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Their recent study, titled “Extending the known region of nonlocal boxes that collapse communication complexity” and published in Physical Review Letters (PRL), discloses that various theoretical quantum theory extensions are considered non-physical when tested against the principle of non-trivial communication complexity.

These quantum theory extensions can be symbolized by an array of nonlocal boxes, which are theoretical devices used to illustrate certain aspects of quantum entanglement and nonlocality.

The study was conducted by Anne Broadbent, a full professor and research chair at the University of Ottawa’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics, along with Pierre Botteron, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Toulouse, France, who is also a visiting student researcher at the University of Ottawa, and Marc-Olivier Proulx, an MSc alumnus of the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa.