Menu

Blog

Page 1834

May 11, 2023

SpaceX Rocket Launches 51 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit, Lands Rocket on Ship at Sea

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

A SpaceX rocket carrying more than four dozen Starlink satellites launched early Wednesday afternoon from the California coast.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off just after 1 p.m. California time from Vandenberg Space Force Base northwest of Santa Barbara. The rocket carried 51 Starlink internet satellites into low-Earth orbit.

Continue reading “SpaceX Rocket Launches 51 Starlink Satellites Into Orbit, Lands Rocket on Ship at Sea” »

May 11, 2023

Aqueos Lithium-Ion Batteries Won’t Catch on Fire — So Why Aren’t They the EV Gold Standard?

Posted by in categories: military, sustainability

An aqueous lithium-ion battery would be safer than the ones being used in EVs today. So why aren’t car companies switching to it?


In the meantime, aqueous Li-ion technology is finding niche uses where limited resilience and longevity are less of an issue such as for the military.

Aqueous Li-ion Recyclability

Continue reading “Aqueos Lithium-Ion Batteries Won’t Catch on Fire — So Why Aren’t They the EV Gold Standard?” »

May 11, 2023

A woman was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer after doctors sent her home with cough syrup

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Alix Burnard, 29, said she was so sick that she couldn’t leave the house without a cup to catch her phlegm and eventually couldn’t climb stairs.

May 11, 2023

He’s Been Dead for Nearly 10 Years. Now He’s Narrating Your Audiobook

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Companies including Apple and Google are embracing the new technology for recording audio versions of books: “It’s a wow moment.”

May 11, 2023

Alphabet gains $131 billion in market value after it unveils AI ambitions at I/O conference

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Investors have cheered news outs of Alphabet’s I/O conference, with the stock posting a two-day gain of 9% during Wednesday and Thursday’s sessions.

May 11, 2023

Why artists shouldn’t fear AI

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Advancements in generative art have many human artists on edge. But should they be worried?

May 11, 2023

Leaked Google engineer memo warns that Big Tech could lose AI race to the little guys

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A leaked memo from a Google employee makes a bold claim that’s taking hold in Silicon Valley and beyond: Big Tech’s advantage in artificial intelligence is shrinking quickly.

The memo, published Thursday on the website for the tech research firm SemiAnalysis, soon became a top story on AI forums, including the popular HackerNews message board and Reddit’s /r/MachineLearning community, which has more than 2.6 million members, and sparked commentary from some of the biggest names in AI.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the memo was authentic but said it was the opinion of one senior employee, not necessarily the company as a whole.

May 11, 2023

Physicists create long-sought topological quantum states

Posted by in categories: computing, mathematics, particle physics, quantum physics

The exotic particles are called non-Abelian anyons, or nonabelions for short, and their Borromean rings exist only as information inside the quantum computer. But their linking properties could help to make quantum computers less error-prone, or more ‘fault-tolerant’ — a key step to making them outperform even the best conventional computers. The results, revealed in a preprint on 9 May1, were obtained on a machine at Quantinuum, a quantum-computing company in Broomfield, Colorado, that formed as the result of a merger between the quantum computing unit of Honeywell and a start-up firm based in Cambridge, UK.

“This is the credible path to fault-tolerant quantum computing,” says Tony Uttley, Quantinuum’s president and chief operating officer.

Other researchers are less optimistic about the virtual nonabelions’ potential to revolutionize quantum computing, but creating them is seen as an achievement in itself. “There is enormous mathematical beauty in this type of physical system, and it’s incredible to see them realized for the first time, after a long time,” says Steven Simon, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, UK.

May 11, 2023

Researchers discover liquid quasicrystal with dodecagonal tiling pattern

Posted by in categories: chemistry, materials

An unusual quasicrystal has been discovered by a team from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), the University of Sheffield and Xi’an Jiaotong University. It has a dodecagonal honeycomb structure that has never been seen before. Until now, similar quasicrystals were only known to come in a solid—not liquid—form. The team presents its results in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Quasicrystals have a special structure. They have a regular pattern similar to normal crystals, however, in normal crystals, the arrangement of the individual components is repeated over and over at . In the case of quasicrystals, the components do not fit together in such a periodic pattern. This special structure gives them special properties that normal crystals do not have.

The newly discovered consists of dodecagons, which in turn are made up of a mixture of triangular, square and, for the first time, trapezoidal shaped cells. These are generated from the self-assembly of “T-shaped” molecules. “We have discovered a perfectly ordered liquid quasicrystal. Such a material has never been seen before,” says chemist Professor Carsten Tschierske at MLU.

May 11, 2023

UK-based tech company claims quantum computing ‘breakthrough’

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Scientists at a UK-based tech company believe they are now a step closer to building a quantum computer that can solve real-world problems, after making progress towards creating a system that protects against errors.

Experts at Quantinuum said they have made a “breakthrough” towards making quantum computing fault tolerant, which would give the system the ability to continue operating without interruption, even if one or more of its components fail.

The race to build a fully functional quantum computer has mostly focused on correcting errors that affect the system, but Ilyas Khan, the company’s founder and chief product officer, said no-one has shown “an actual demonstration of a step towards qubits, the quantum equivalent of what we refer to as a ‘bit’ in existing computers, that are naturally fault tolerant”.