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Blog – Page 1533

The performance of numerous cutting-edge technologies, from lithium-ion batteries to the next wave of superconductors, hinges on a physical characteristic called intercalation. Predicting which intercalated materials will be stable poses a significant challenge, leading to extensive trial-and-error experimentation in the development of new products.

Now, in a study recently published in ACS Physical Chemistry Au, researchers from the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, and collaborating partners have devised a straightforward equation that correctly predicts the stability of intercalated materials. The systematic design guidelines enabled by this work will speed up the development of upcoming high-performance electronics and energy-storage devices.

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DESI Survey announces the most precise measurements of our expanding #universe using the BAO signal in 6.1 Million #galaxies and #Quasars from Year 1, tracing dark energy through cosmic time.

With 5,000 tiny robots in a mountaintop telescope, researchers can look 11 billion years into the past. The light from far-flung objects in space is just now reaching the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), enabling us to map our cosmos as it was in its youth and trace its growth to what we see today. Understanding how our universe has evolved is tied to how it ends, and to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy, the unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster.

To study dark energy’s effects over the past 11 billion years, DESI has created the largest 3D map of our cosmos ever constructed, with the most precise measurements to date. This is the first time scientists have measured the expansion history of the young universe with a precision better than 1%, giving us our best view yet of how the universe evolved.

Continue reading “First Results from DESI Make the Most Precise Measurement of Our Expanding Universe” | >

Did Mars once contain life, or even the building block for life? This is what NASA’s Perseverance (Percy) rover has been trying to determine ever since it landed in Jezero Crater, which has shown an overwhelming amount of evidence to have once been site to a massive lakebed. Now, NASA recently announced that Percy has collected its 24th rock sample on March 11th, nicknamed “Comet Geyser”, with this sample being unlike the first 23 in that evidence suggests it was submerged in standing water for an indeterminant amount of time when Mars had liquid water billions of years ago.

Mosaic image of the drill holes where NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover extracted the “Comet Geyser” rock sample. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS)

“To put it simply, this is the kind of rock we had hoped to find when we decided to investigate Jezero Crater,” said Dr. Ken Farley, who is a project scientist for Perseverance and a professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. “Nearly all the minerals in the rock we just sampled were made in water; on Earth, water-deposited minerals are often good at trapping and preserving ancient organic material and biosignatures. The rock can even tell us about Mars climate conditions that were present when it was formed.”

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Pittsburgh biotech grows second liver in-body:

As per Nature, the experimental procedure was conducted in Houston on March 25. The report also states that the patient is “recovering well” after receiving the treatment. However, the formation of the new liver-like organ in the lymph node may take several months.

Moreover, the individual will be kept on immunosuppressive drugs to prevent any initial rejection of the donor cells.

The physicians will continue to monitor the patient’s health closely.

Continue reading “Groundbreaking trial to grow ‘mini liver’ from patient’s own lymph node” | >

“Gravity pulls matter together, so that when we throw a ball in the air, the Earth’s gravity pulls it down toward the planet,” Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) at UT Dallas, and member of the DESI collaboration, said in a statement. “But at the largest scales, the universe acts differently. It’s acting like there is something repulsive pushing the universe apart and accelerating its expansion. This is a big mystery, and we are investigating it on several fronts. Is it an unknown dark energy in the universe, or is it a modification of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity at cosmological scales?”

DESI’s data, however, shows that the universe may have evolved in a way that isn’t quite consistent with the Lambda CDM model, indicating that the effects of dark energy on the universe may have changed since the early days of the cosmos.

“Our results show some interesting deviations from the standard model of the universe that could indicate that dark energy is evolving over time,” Ishak-Boushaki said. “The more data we collect, the better equipped we will be to determine whether this finding holds. With more data, we might identify different explanations for the result we observe or confirm it. If it persists, such a result will shed some light on what is causing cosmic acceleration and provide a huge step in understanding the evolution of our universe.”

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