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Blog – Page 1537

For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Synthesis.

Scientists have long tried to make single-atom-thick sheets of gold but failed because the metal’s tendency to lump together. But researchers from Linköping University have now succeeded thanks to a hundred-year-old method used by Japanese smiths.

“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens—as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.

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Today is the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Venado” supercomputer, which was hinted at back in April 2021 when Nvidia announced its plans for its first datacenter-class Arm server CPU and which was talked about in some detail – but not really enough to suit our taste for speeds and feeds – back in May 2022 by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory where Venado is situated.

Now we can finally get more details on the Venado system and get a little more insight into how Los Alamos will put it to work, and more specifically, why a better balance of memory bandwidth and compute that depends upon it is perhaps more important to this lab than it is in other HPC centers of the world.

Los Alamos was founded back in 1943 as the home of the Manhattan Project that created the world’s first nuclear weapons. We did not have supercomputers back then, of course, but plenty of very complex calculations have always been done at Los Alamos; sometimes by hand, sometimes by tabulators from IBM that used punch cards to store and manipulate data – an early form of simulation. The first digital computer to do such calculations at Los Alamos was called MANIAC and was installed in 1952; it could perform 10,000 operations per second and ran Monte Carlo simulations, which use randomness to simulate what are actually deterministic processes.

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I found this on NewsBreak:

Australians are nervous about AI. Efforts are underway to put their minds at ease: advisory committees, consultations and regulations. But these actions have tended to be reactive instead of proactive. We need to imagine potential scenarios before they happen.

Of course, we already do this – in literature.

There is, in fact, more than 100 years’ worth of Australian literature about AI and robotics. Nearly 2,000 such works are listed in the AustLit database, a bibliography of Australian literature that includes novels, screenplays, poetry and other kinds of literature.

Continue reading “Australian writers have been envisioning AI for a century. Here are 5 stories to read as we grapple with rapid change” | >

I found this on NewsBreak.

Researchers in China have reportedly developed a new technology similar to hydropanels for harvesting water out of thin air that is powered by energy from the sun. The device could be especially useful in dry, arid areas where water — but not sunlight — is hard to come by.

The findings from the research team from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China were published in the scientific journal Applied Physics Reviews.

Continue reading “Scientists make breakthrough with advanced technology generating water from thin air — and it could save millions of lives” | >

An increase in cancers among people 55 years old and younger may be related to accelerated aging in recent generations, according to a study presented at a conference earlier this month.

Experts say years of research support this, though more questions remain to be answered.

Researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis’s medical school presented the findings from their study on accelerated aging earlier this month at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting.

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