Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s massive human population is leveling off.

Most projections show we’ll hit peak humanity in the 21st century, as people choose to have smaller families and women gain power over their own reproduction. This is great news for the future of our species.

And yet alarms are sounding. While environmentalists have long warned of a planet with too many people, now some economists are warning of a future with too few. For example, economist Dean Spears from the University of Texas has written that an “unprecedented decline” in population will lead to a bleak future of slower economic growth and less innovation.

Experts used to believe that stress, sleep problems, and substance use contributed to chronic mental health issues in a cause-and-effect type of way. What we now know is that the relationship between these factors is more complicated, and circular in nature. Join a panel of University of Michigan Health experts to discuss the complex interplay between stress, sleep, and substance use. Learn about the multidisciplinary approach U-M experts are taking in response to the mental health crisis in America and how emerging technologies can play a role in managing these risk factors.

Inga-Av / iStock.

Now, Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist, is following up on such a theory and investigating a new law of physics to support the idea that our reality might be a computer simulation, according to a statement by the University of Portsmouth.

The first people to make and use quantum dots were glassmakers. Working thousands of years ago, they realized that the same chemical mixture could turn glass into different colors, depending on how they heated it.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors three scientists who, along with their colleagues, students, and staff, figured out why the ancient glassmakers’ methods worked — and how to control them much more precisely. During the waning days of the Cold War, Alexei Ekimov and Louis Brus, working in separate labs on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, both discovered the same thing: that tiny crystals (just millionths of a millimeter wide) act very differently than larger pieces of the exact same material. These tiny, weird crystals are called quantum dots, and just a few years after the Berlin Wall fell, Moungi Bawendi figured out how to mass-produce them.

That changed everything. Quantum dots are crystals so small that they follow different rules of physics than the materials we’re used to. Today, these tiny materials help surgeons map different types of cells in the body, paint vivid color images on QLED screens, and give LED lights a warmer glow.

Scientists have just caught up with something that Scandinavians have suspected strongly for over a century: Ammonium chloride (NH₄Cl) may be a basic taste, joining sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

Denizens of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands gobble up the compound in “salmiak,” a salt licorice candy. But don’t be fooled by the “candy” label. As Andrew Richdale wrote for Saveur back in 2017, salmiak tastes nothing like any other candy you have ever tried.

“The first time I sampled salmiak… I spit it out on a Copenhagen street corner. It wasn’t that this powerful little pastille was bad. It’s just that my taste buds had never quite been lit up that way: smacked with a layer of sharp and sour salt dust, then soothed by something bitter and caramel-sweet. It felt simultaneously fascinating and… abusive? Or at least odd, like a knocked funny bone.”

Oct. 5, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) The sun is about to lose something important: Its magnetic poles.

Recent measurements by NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory reveal a rapid weakening of magnetic fields in the polar regions of the sun. North and south magnetic poles are on the verge of disappearing. This will lead to a complete reversal of the sun’s global magnetic field perhaps before the end of the year.

An artist’s concept of the sun’s dipolar magnetic field. Credit: NSF/AURA/NSO.

Researchers have developed an easy-to-use optical chip that can configure itself to achieve various functions. The positive real-valued matrix computation they have achieved gives the chip the potential to be used in applications requiring optical neural networks. Optical neural networks can be used for a variety of data-heavy tasks such as image classification, gesture interpretation and speech recognition.

Photonic integrated circuits that can be reconfigured after manufacturing to perform different functions have been developed previously. However, they tend to be difficult to configure because the user needs to understand the internal structure and principles of the chip and individually adjust its basic units.

“Our new chip can be treated as a black box, meaning users don’t need to understand its internal structure to change its function,” said research team leader Jianji Dong from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. “They only need to set a training objective, and, with computer control, the chip will self-configure to achieve the desired functionality based on the input and output.”

The many-body interaction of charges (electrons) and nuclei (phonons) plays a critical role in determining the properties and functionalities of molecules and solids. The exact correlated motion of these particles gives rise to different conductivity, energy storage capabilities, phase transitions, and superconductivity. Now, the team of ICREA Prof. at ICFO Jens Biegert has developed attosecond soft X-ray core-level spectroscopy as a method to observe the correlated interaction between charges and phonons in real time.

Attosecond soft X-ray spectroscopy relies on the use of ultrashort pulses with photon energies that cover the entire water-window range. Through high-order harmonic generation with an intense few-cycle short-wavelength infrared pulse, the team has successfully generated a bright 165 attosecond pulse with photon energies of up to 600 eV. By directing this ultrashort soft X-ray pulse into the sample, the high-energy photons can excite the electrons in the K-shell or L-shell to unoccupied or continuum states.

This soft X-ray absorption spectroscopy provides researchers with a powerful tool for unraveling the electronic and structural characteristics of the material at the same time.

Imagine that you have a secret decoder ring that you can use to decipher a secret message with important clues about things around you: where they came from, why they are there, and what will become of them in the future. Now imagine that the secret decoder ring is actually a sensor that can be flown in space to unravel secrets about the matter in the solar system. Where did this matter originate, how did it become energized, and how could it impact humans living on Earth and traveling in space?

The Solar Wind Pickup Ion Composition Energy Spectrometer (SPICES) is like a decoder ring for the plasma (gas consisting of electrically charged particles) in the solar system. It has the potential to reveal important information about how the sun behaves and interacts with planets and their atmospheres, and how the solar system is impacted by its own motion through interstellar space.

The universe is mostly made of hydrogen, but the elements that make up life as well as the planets, comets, and many other celestial bodies are heavier than hydrogen. In fact, these heavier elements, although not as abundant, can hold the key to understanding how numerous processes in the universe work. In our solar system, these “heavy elements”—which are called “heavy ions” when they are electrically charged—can help us trace plasma to its origin at planets, comets, the sun and solar atmosphere, and even to interstellar space.