Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have created unique Slater-Pauling Heusler materials with semiconductor properties, offering significant potential in thermoelectric applications. Their research reveals these materials’ unique electron redistribution and thermal properties.

Recently, researchers from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) designed Slater-Pauling (S-P) Heusler materials with a unique structure resembling a Rubik’s cube. These materials showed potential in thermoelectric applications due to their semiconductor-like properties.

Unique Semiconductor Behavior

Test images showcase how XRISM will explore the universe’s evolution and the structure of spacetime.

Without question, the biggest bottleneck in artificial intelligence and for a lot of HPC workloads today is bandwidth. Bandwidth at the network level; bandwidth at the socket level; bandwidth at the compute and memory level. No matter how many teraflops one single chip can push at high precision, once your workload scales beyond a single accelerator, node, or rack, bandwidth quickly becomes the limiting factor.

We have seen chipmakers grapple with this on a number of levels, by packing more high-bandwidth memory onto their chips, boosting interconnect speeds, and by using chiplets to push beyond reticle limits. Intel’s “Ponte Vecchio” Max Series GPU and AMD’s recently announced “Antares” Instinct MI300X GPU are prime examples of the latter. Driving data between chiplets does introduce I/O bottlenecks in its own right, but we can’t exactly make the dies any bigger.

Aside from needing a socket that is bigger than the reticle limit of lithography machines, we still need more capacity to satiate the demands of modern AI and HPC workloads. Over the past few years, we’ve seen a trend toward denser boxes, racks, and clusters. Cloud providers, hyperscalers, and GPU bit barns are now deploying clusters with tens of thousands of accelerators to keep up with demand for AI applications. It’s at this beach head that silicon photonics startup Lightmatter, now valued at more than $1 billion, believes it has the market cornered.

Berlin-based designer Kimia Amir-Moazami hopes to tackle the issue of food waste with a container system that reveals if something is safe to eat or not.

Vorkoster is a smart lid that uses PH-sensitive film to detect if a food product has expired. The film gradually changes colour as the food product begins to spoil, making it easy to see whether it’s still edible.

This can provide an accurate indication of food freshness so that people don’t have to rely on generic expiry dates, which can lead to food being thrown out unnecessarily.

Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.

The future of our Sun is a topic that captivates so many people. The age and life cycle, as well as its potential death date have been studied by scie.

The cultural forces that fueled our success now threaten to end it.

It’s their final frontier.

After an eight-month delay, a rocket will finally release into deep space the remains of 330 people from all walks of life — including George Washington and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

Texas-based company Celestis Inc.’s inaugural Enterprise Flight is scheduled to launch at 2:18 a.m. Monday from Cape Canaveral in Florida, marking the first time human remains will be released on the moon and beyond by a commercial company.

A spectacular design for a space elevator, with the goal of efficiently transporting passengers into outer space, has been awarded a $11,000 prize.

As the BBC reports, British architect Jordan William Hughes won the prize for space architecture and innovation from the Jacques Rougerie Foundation in Paris.

His concept, dubbed Ascensio, connects an ocean-based ship to a structure in Earth’s orbit via a cable-like structure. The ship is designed to keep up with the spaceport by moving around the ocean.