Ten years after the first detection of gravitational waves, scientists have captured the clearest signal yet — and it confirms one of Stephen Hawking’s most famous predictions.
Using the upgraded LIGO detectors, researchers observed two black holes colliding over a billion light-years away, producing space-time ripples so precise they could “hear” the black holes ring like cosmic bells.
A new window on the universe.
“Using a secret manager dramatically improves the security posture of systems that rely on shared secrets, but heavy use perpetuates the use of shared secrets rather than using strong identities,” according to identity security researchers. The goal isn’t to eliminate secret managers entirely, but to dramatically reduce their scope.
Smart organizations are strategically reducing their secret footprint by 70–80% through managed identities, then using robust secret management for remaining use cases, creating resilient architectures that leverage the best of both worlds.
The Non-Human Identity Discovery Challenge
While the technology of nuclear batteries has been available since the 1950s, today’s drive to electrify and decarbonize increases the impetus to find emission-free power sources and reliable energy storage. As a result, innovations are bringing renewed focus to nuclear energy in batteries.
Nuclear batteries — those using the natural decay of radioactive material to create an electric current — have been used in space applications or remote operations such as arctic lighthouses, where changing a battery is difficult or even impossible. The Mars Science Laboratory rover, for example, uses radioisotopic power systems (RPS), which convert heat from radioactive decay into electricity via a thermoelectric generator. Betavolt’s innovation, 3, is a betavoltaic battery that uses beta particles rather than heat as its energy source. (Probably a repost from March 11 2024)
There are additional challenges that hinder the wider usage of these and all types of nuclear batteries, particularly material supply and discomfort with the use of radioactive materials. Yet, the physical and materials science behind this technology could unlock important advances for CO2-free energy and provide power for applications where currently available energy storage technologies are insufficient.
How do betavoltaic batteries work?
Betavoltaic batteries contain radioactive emitters and semiconductor absorbers. As the emitter material naturally decays, it releases beta particles, or high-speed electrons, which strike the absorber material in the battery, separating electrons from atomic nuclei in the semiconductor absorber. Separation of the resulting electron-hole pairs generates an electric current in the absorber, resulting in electrical power that can be delivered by the battery.
Flexible piezoelectric energy harvesters (FPEHs) have wide applications in mechanical energy harvesting, portable device driving, and piezoelectric sensors. However, the poor output performance of piezoelectric energy harvesters and the intrinsic shortcoming of piezoelectric sensors that can only detect dynamic pressure limit their further applications. BaTiO3 (BT) and PVDF are deposited on the glass fiber electronic cloth (GFEC) by impregnation and spin-coating methods, respectively, to form BT-GFEC/PVDF piezoelectric composite films. A mixed solution of mechanoluminescence (ML) particles ZnS: Cu and PDMS are used as the encapsulation layer to construct a high-performance ML-FPEH with self-powered electrical and optical dual-mode response characteristics. Due to the interconnection structure of the piezoelectric films, the prepared ML-FPEH illustrates a high effective energy harvesting performance (≈58 V, ≈43.56 µW cm−2). It can also effectively harvest mechanical energy from human activities. More importantly, ML-FPEH can sense stress distribution of hand-writing via ML to achieve stress visualization, making up for the shortcomings of piezoelectric sensors. This work provides a new strategy for endowing FPEH with dual-mode sensing and energy harvesting.
Astronomers have characterized the atmosphere of a young (20 Myr old) transiting exoplanet and found it to be unusually clear and puffy. By analyzing the planet’s atmospheric features, they were able to precisely measure the planet’s mass surpassing traditional dynamical techniques like radial velocity, which poorly perform with such active young stars. They found that V1298 Tau b is a proto-sub-Neptune, still hot and inflated from its recent formation.
The team, led by Saugata Barat (MIT, MA, US) and his Ph.D. supervisor Jean-Michel Désert (UvA, Netherlands) used the James Webb Space Telescope to study the very young planet, and their results are accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal and currently available on the preprint server arXiv.
V1298 Tau b is just 10 to 30 million years old and has an unusually clear and puffy atmosphere. The astronomers detected strong absorption signals from molecules like water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and even hints of complex photochemical processes, such as tentative detections of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and carbonyl sulfide (OCS).
A research team has discovered an electrochemical method that allows highly selective para-position single-carbon insertion into polysubstituted pyrroles. Their approach has important applications in synthetic organic chemistry, especially in the field of pharmaceuticals.
Their work is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on July 14.
“We set out to address the longstanding challenge of achieving single-carbon insertion into aromatic rings with precise positional control,” said Mahito Atobe, Professor, Faculty of Engineering, YOKOHAMA National University. Transformations that modify aromatic rings are central to pharmaceutical and materials synthesis. However, inserting a single carbon atom into a specific position—especially the para-position—has remained extremely rare. Para position describes the location of substituents, those atoms that replace a hydrogen atom on a molecule. In the single carbon insertion approach, researchers add a single carbon atom into a molecule’s carbon framework. This lengthens a carbon chain or expands a ring by one carbon unit.
Method has organic chemistry applications, especially in pharmaceuticals.