Lifeboat Foundation

A Whole New World

Scientists have already found hundreds of exotic amino acids. AI models such as AlphaFold or RoseTTAFold, and their variations, are likely to spawn even more. Finding carriers and “glue” proteins that match has always been a roadblock.

The new study establishes a method to speed up the search for new designer proteins with unusual properties. For now, the method can only incorporate four synthetic amino acids. But scientists are already envisioning uses for them.

“The key take-home from this study is that small electric aircraft can have a notably lower climate impact – up to 60 percent less – and other types of environmental impacts than equivalent fossil-fueled aircraft,” said Dr. Rickard Arvidsson.

In a time when electric cars are increasing in number around the world and contributing to a greener future, can electric aircraft do the same? This is what a recent study published in The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment hopes to address as a team of researchers from the Chalmers Institute of Technology in Sweden investigated the environmental impact of an electric aircraft versus a fossil fuel-based counterpart. This study holds the potential to help better understand the pros and cons of electric aircraft while underscoring their environmental impact for both the short-and long-term.

For the study the researchers conducted a life cycle assessment of a “Pipistrel Alpha Electro” aircraft and a fossil fuel-based aircraft to determine which was more environmentally friendly. The Alpha Electro’s structure consisted of an approximately 10-meter (33-feet) wingspan and weighs 550 kg (1212 pounds) at full weight. It was powered by a 21 kWh NMC (nickel-manganese cobalt) lithium-ion battery, resulting in a 60 kW engine output. The fossil fuel-based aircraft was comprised of the same structure as the Alpha Electro aside from the gas engine and fuel tank. The goal of the study was to ascertain when the Alpha Electro obtains a “break-even” point with its gas-powered counterpart in terms of the overall environmental impact.

Continue reading “The Role of Electric Aircraft in Reducing Environmental Impact” »

BMW’s 5 series is set to expand very soon. The automaker is teasing the new BMW i5 M60 Touring, giving us a sneak peek at what we can expect from the high-performance EV.

After teasing an electric 5 series sedan for over six years, BMW finally unveiled the i5 last May. It’s a slightly larger, all-electric take on its predecessor. BMW included its latest software and tech, including OS 8.5.

The i5 is in the middle of the 3 series and larger 7 series in BMW’s lineup. As its second best-selling vehicle, the 5 series has and will continue to play a key role in the brand’s success.

Apple has backtracked expectations to bring a more realistic EV to market by 2028.

Color mixing is the process of combining two or more colors: red and green make yellow, blue and red make purple, red and green and blue make white. This process of mixing colors is the basis for the future of solid-state lighting. While currently white light is achieved by phosphor down-conversion, LED color mixing actually has a higher theoretical maximum efficiency, which is needed in order to achieve the 2035 DOE energy efficiency goals.

Despite the potential efficiency of color-mixed LED sources, there exists one significant challenge: green. The “green gap” is described as the lack of suitable green LEDs. Current green LEDs are made from state-of-the-art hexagonal III-nitride but only reach one third of the efficiency goals laid out in the 2035 DOE roadmap.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have found a potential path to fill the green gap and report a green-emitting cubic III-nitride active layer with 32% internal quantum efficiency (IQE), which is more than 6 times higher efficiency than what is reported in the literature for conventional cubic active layers.

The bulk of the computing in state-of-the-art neural networks comprises linear operations, e.g., matrix-vector multiplications and convolutions. Linear operations can also play an important role in cryptography. While dedicated processors such as GPUs and TPUs are available for performing highly parallel linear operations, these devices are power-hungry, and the low bandwidth of electronics still limits their operation speed. Optics is better suited for such operations because of its inherent parallelism and large bandwidth and computation speed.

Built from a set of spatially engineered thin surfaces, diffractive deep neural networks (D²NN), also known as diffractive networks, form a recently emerging optical computing architecture capable of performing computational tasks passively at the speed of light propagation through an ultra-thin volume.

These task-specific all-optical computers are designed digitally through learning of the spatial features of their constituent diffractive surfaces. Following this one-time design process, the optimized surfaces are fabricated and assembled to form the physical hardware of the diffractive optical network.

Using the valley degree of freedom in analogy to spin to encode qubits could be advantageous as many of the known decoherence mechanisms do not apply. Now long relaxation times are demonstrated for valley qubits in bilayer graphene quantum dots.

An international team of researchers from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany) and the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (United Kingdom) has disproved a previously held assumption about the impact of multiphoton components in interference effects of thermal fields (e.g., sunlight) and parametric single photons (generated in non-linear crystals). The journal Physical Review Letters has published the team’s research.

“We experimentally proved that the interference effect between thermal light and parametric single photons also leads to quantum interference with the background field. For this reason, the background cannot simply be neglected and subtracted from calculations, as has been the case up to now,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Kues, Head of the Institute of Photonics and member of the Board of the PhoenixD Cluster of Excellence at Leibniz University Hannover.

The leading scientist was Ph.D. student Anahita Khodadad Kashi, who performs research on photonic quantum information processing at the Institute of Photonics. She investigated how the visibility of the so-called Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, a quantum interference effect, is affected by multiphoton contamination.

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.

By using public data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a research team led by Prof. Guo Qi from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) analyzed the kinematics of satellite pairs around massive galaxy groups. The team’s findings suggest that the universe may be younger than predicted by the LCDM model with Planck cosmological parameters.