Lifeboat Foundation

Our universe could be twice as old as current estimates, according to a new study that challenges the dominant cosmological model and sheds new light on the so-called “impossible early galaxy problem.”

“Our newly-devised model stretches the galaxy formation time by a several billion years, making the universe 26.7 billion years old, and not 13.7 as previously estimated,” says author Rajendra Gupta, adjunct professor of physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of Ottawa.

For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of our universe by measuring the time elapsed since the Big Bang and by studying the oldest stars based on the redshift of light coming from distant galaxies. In 2021, thanks to new techniques and advances in technology, the age of our universe was thus estimated at 13.797 billion years using the Lambda-CDM concordance model.

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Ammonia, chemically written as NH₃, is widely used across industries ranging from textiles to pharmaceuticals and is an important component in the manufacture of fertilizers. For its current use, ammonia is stored in pressure-resistant containers after liquefying it at temperatures of-27 Fahrenheit (−33 degrees Celsius).

Advancing the state of the art in superconducting qubit hardware requires knowledge across a range of disciplines, including materials, fabrication, circuit design and simulation, packaging, cryogenics, low-noise measurement, hardware-software interfacing, and quantum compilation. As understanding of materials and processes has advanced over time, fabricating the highest-quality qubits increasingly relies on millions of dollars of fabrication equipment and countless hours of process development and sustainment.

“It has become increasingly challenging for individual organizations to maintain this full stack of expertise, particularly as circuits become more complex to design, fabricate, and measure,” Schwartz says. “As a result, superconducting qubit hardware research has remained centralized into a relatively small number of laboratories and large universities capable of developing and sustaining this expertise.”

MIT Lincoln Laboratory is one of these laboratories, with more than 20 years of research and development in superconducting qubits and demonstrations of world-leading qubit performance. The qubits are made on-site at the Microelectronics Laboratory, considered to be one of the U.S. government’s most advanced foundries, and in specialized prototyping facilities. The collective expertise and equipment of this facility have made it possible to stand-up the SQUILL Foundry.

An international team of physicists has succeeded in measuring a property of the electron known as topological spin winding for the first time. The team obtained this result by studying the behaviour of electrons in so-called kagome metals, which are materials that have unique quantum properties related to their physical shape, or topology. The work could advance our understanding of the physics of superconductors and other systems that contain strongly correlated electrons.

Kagome metals are named after a traditional Japanese basket-weaving technique that produces a lattice of interlaced, symmetrical triangles with shared corners. When the atoms of a metal or other conductor are arranged in this kagome pattern, their electrons behave in unusual ways. For example, the wavefunctions of the electrons can interfere destructively, resulting in highly localized electronic states in which the particles interact strongly with each other. These strong interactions lead to a range of quantum phenomena, including magnetic ordering of unpaired electrons spins that can produce, for example, ferro-or antiferromagnetic phases, superconducting structures, quantum spin liquids and abnormal topological phases. All these phases have applications in advanced nanoelectronics and spintronics technologies.

In the new work, researchers led by Domenico Di Sante of the University of Bologna in Italy studied the spin and electronic structure of XV₆Sn₆, where X is a rare-earth element. These recently-discovered kagome metals contain a Dirac electronic band and a nearly flat electronic band. At the point at which these bands meet, an effect called spin-orbit coupling creates a narrow gap between the bands. This spin-orbit coupling also creates special type of electronic ground state at the material’s surface.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled a stunning 3D visualization of 5,000 galaxies, providing a glimpse into the vast cosmic expanse.

The visualization, part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, takes viewers on a journey through nearby galaxies to those in the far reaches of the universe, including one that has never been seen before by the telescope.

Continue reading “NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope Unveils 3D Visualization of 5,000 Galaxies” »

SAN FRANCISCO, July 11 (Reuters) — International Business Machines (IBM) (IBM.N) is considering the use of artificial intelligence chips that it designed in-house to lower the costs of operating a cloud computing service it made widely available this week, an executive said Tuesday.

In an interview with Reuters at a semiconductor conference in San Francisco, Mukesh Khare, general manager of IBM Semiconductors, said the company is contemplating using a chip called the Artificial Intelligence Unit as part of its new “watsonx” cloud service.

IBM is hoping to take advantage of the boom in generative AI technologies that can write human-like text more than a decade after Watson, its first major AI system, failed to gain market traction.

AI is growing in its capability, and threatens the way we live and our security. Other technologies like Web3/metaverse and defi are not as threatening, and are shrinking in importance as interest rates rise.

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Autophagy plays important but complex roles in aging, affecting health and longevity. We found that, in the general population, the levels of ATG4B and ATG4D decreased during aging, yet they are upregulated in centenarians, suggesting that overexpression of ATG4 members could be positive for healthspan and lifespan. We therefore analyzed the effect of overexpressing Atg4b (a homolog of human ATG4D) in Drosophila, and found that, indeed, Atg4b overexpression increased resistance to oxidative stress, desiccation stress and fitness as measured by climbing ability. The overexpression induced since mid-life increased lifespan. Transcriptome analysis of Drosophila subjected to desiccation stress revealed that Atg4b overexpression increased stress response pathways. In addition, overexpression of ATG4B delayed cellular senescence, and improved cell proliferation.