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Jan 24, 2024

The Periodic Table Just Got a Cheat Sheet: Discover the Ten Electron Rule

Posted by in categories: chemistry, computing, particle physics

The ‘ten electron’ rule provides guidance for the design of single-atom alloy catalysts for targeted chemical reactions.

A collaborative team across four universities have discovered a very simple rule to design single-atom alloy catalysts for chemical reactions. The ‘ten electron rule’ helps scientists identify promising catalysts for their experiments very rapidly. Instead of extensive trial and error experiments of computationally demanding computer simulations, catalysts’ composition can be proposed simply by looking at the periodic table.

Single-atom alloys are a class of catalysts made of two metals: a few atoms of reactive metal, called the dopant, are diluted in an inert metal (copper, silver, or gold). This recent technology is extremely efficient at speeding up chemical reactions but traditional models don’t explain how they work.

Jan 24, 2024

Microgravity Masters: Expedition 70 and Ax-3 Crews Working Together on Space Station

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry, health, neuroscience

Eleven astronauts and cosmonauts from around the world are living and working together aboard the International Space Station (ISS) today, January 22. The four Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) private astronauts met the seven Expedition 70 crew members on Saturday beginning two weeks of dual operations.

The Ax-3 crew spent the weekend getting familiar with space station systems and emergency procedures before starting Monday with a full schedule of science and media activities. Ax-3 Commander Michael López-Alegría joined Pilot Walter Villadei and studied how microgravity affects the biochemistry of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s to improve health on Earth and in space. The duo later inserted samples into a fluorescence microscope for a study seeking to prevent and predict cancer diseases to protect crews in space and humans on Earth.

Jan 24, 2024

Challenging Cosmic Ages: Galactic Dance Reveals Universe Is Younger Than Thought

Posted by in category: space

A study using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data reveals that the Universe may be younger than estimated, challenging conventional cosmological models by analyzing satellite galaxy motions around massive groups.

In standard cosmological models, the formation of cosmological structures begins with the emergence of small structures, which subsequently undergo hierarchical merging, leading to the formation of larger systems. As the Universe ages, massive galaxy groups and clusters, being the largest systems, tend to increase in mass and reach a more dynamically relaxed state.

The motions of satellite galaxies around these groups and clusters provide valuable insights into their assembly status. The observations of such motion offer crucial clues about the age of the Universe.

Jan 24, 2024

DARPA’s 2nd Tools Competition Focuses on AI Tools for Adult STEM, Data Science Learning

Posted by in categories: mathematics, robotics/AI, science

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a second iteration of its Tools Competition to discover artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that can aid data science and other forms of adult learning.

The agency said Monday that the new program aims to upskill and reskill adults in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and similarly complex areas, preparing them for the 21st century labor landscape.

The opportunity is open to digital learning platform experts, technologists, researchers, students and educators who can propose AI tools that can provide feature tutoring and self-directed learning. The resulting platform may leverage AI or large language models.

Jan 24, 2024

Optoacoustic Cooling of Traveling Hypersound Waves

Posted by in category: quantum physics

We experimentally demonstrate optoacoustic cooling via stimulated Brillouin-Mandelstam scattering in a 50 cm long tapered photonic crystal fiber. For a 7.38 GHz acoustic mode, a cooling rate of 219 K from room temperature has been achieved. As anti-Stokes and Stokes Brillouin processes naturally break the symmetry of phonon cooling and heating, resolved sideband schemes are not necessary. The experiments pave the way to explore the classical to quantum transition for macroscopic objects and could enable new quantum technologies in terms of storage and repeater schemes.

Jan 24, 2024

Researchers design new open-source technology for interfacing with living neurons

Posted by in categories: biological, neuroscience

Mind In Vitro Platforms: Versatile, Scalable, Robust, and Open Solutions to Interfacing with Living Neurons.


Neurons intricately communicate and respond to stimuli within a vast network, orchestrating essential functions from basic bodily processes to complex thoughts. Traditional neuroscience methods, relying on in vivo electrophysiology (within a living organism), often have difficulty addressing the complexity of the brain as a whole.

An alternative approach involves extracting cells from the organism and conducting studies on a culture dish instead (in vitro), providing researchers with enhanced control and precision in measuring neural processes.

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Jan 24, 2024

Liquid lithium on the walls of a fusion device helps the plasma within maintain a hot edge

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, particle physics

Emerging research suggests it may be easier to use fusion as a power source if liquid lithium is applied to the internal walls of the device housing the fusion plasma.

Plasma, the fourth state of matter, is a hot gas made of electrically charged particles. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are working on solutions to efficiently harness the power of fusion to offer a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels, often using devices called tokamaks, which confine plasma using magnetic fields.

“The purpose of these devices is to confine the energy,” said Dennis Boyle, a staff research physicist at PPPL. “If you had much better energy confinement, you could make the machines smaller and less expensive. That would make the whole thing a lot more practical, and cost-effective so that governments and industry want to invest more in it.”

Jan 24, 2024

The True Story of How GPT-2 Became Maximally Lewd

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

In this video, we recount an incident that occurred at OpenAI while researchers were trying to finetune GPT-2 to be as helpful and ethical as possible. It’s narrated that inadvertently flipping a single minus sign led GPT-2 to become the embodiment of a well-known cardinal sin.

#ai #aisafety #alignment.

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Jan 23, 2024

Reversing wrinkled skin and hair loss in mice by restoring mitochondrial function

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, genetics

Year 2018 Age related symptoms may be even more simple to reverse by recharging the mitochondria then eventually we can have genetically engineered mitochondria to run longer so the cycles of the human body could run indefinitely.


Singh, B., Schoeb, T.R., Bajpai, P. et al. Reversing wrinkled skin and hair loss in mice by restoring mitochondrial function. Cell Death Dis 9, 735 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41419-018-0765-9

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Jan 23, 2024

Brain-based computing chips not just for AI anymore

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, finance, mathematics, robotics/AI

With the insertion of a little math, Sandia National Laboratories researchers have shown that neuromorphic computers, which synthetically replicate the brain’s logic, can solve more complex problems than those posed by artificial intelligence and may even earn a place in high-performance computing.

The findings, detailed in a recent article in the journal Nature Electronics, show that neuromorphic simulations employing the statistical method called random walks can track X-rays passing through bone and soft tissue, disease passing through a population, information flowing through social networks and the movements of financial markets, among other uses, said Sandia theoretical neuroscientist and lead researcher James Bradley Aimone.

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