Lifeboat Foundation

University of Chicago scientists have developed a way to improve chemical reactions in drug manufacturing using electricity. This breakthrough in electrochemistry, enhancing efficiency and sustainability, opens new avenues in green chemical production. Credit: SciTechDaily.com.

As the world moves away from gas towards electricity as a greener power source, the to-do list goes beyond cars. The vast global manufacturing network that makes everything from our batteries to our fertilizers needs to flip the switch, too.

A study from UChicago chemists found a way to use electricity to boost a type of chemical reaction often used in synthesizing new candidates for pharmaceutical drugs.

Furthermore, they are recognized transcription factors critical in human embryo development and tissue function.

Potential novel cancer therapeutics

The statement noted that this discovery opens the door to potential novel cancer therapeutics.

Continue reading “Scientists are advancing cancer treatments after cracking IKAROS code” »

From the Moon’s south pole to an ice-covered ocean world, several exciting space missions are slated for launch in 2024.

Overall, they put the odds at around five percent.

This week, Intel began to receive its first ASML’s extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool with a 0.55 numerical aperture (High-NA), which it will use to learn how to use the technology before deploying the machines for a post-18A production node in the next couple of years or so. By contrast, TSMC is in no rush to adopt High-NA EUV any time soon, and it might be years before the company jumps on this bandwagon in 2030 or beyond, according to analysts from both China Renaissance and SemiAnalysis.

“In contrast to Intel’s use of High-NA EUV soon after its shift to GAA (planned for [20A] insertion), we expect TSMC’sHigh-NA EUV insertion in the post N1.4 era (the inflection likely at N1, scheduled for post-2030 launch),” wrote Szeho Ng, an analyst with China Renaissance.

Super Humanity — This documentary examines breakthroughs in neuroscience and technology. Imagine a future where the human brain and artificial intelligence connect.

Super Humanity (2019)
Director: Ruth Chao.
Writers: Ruth Chao, Paula Cons, Alphonse de la Puente.
Genre: Documentary, Sci-Fi.
Country: Portugal, Spain.
Language: English.
Release Date: December 27, 2019 (Spain)

Continue reading “Super Humanity | Breakthroughs in Neuroscience” »

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.