Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers are perplexed by the discovery of an exoplanet with a mass that greatly surpasses what would be predicted given its closeness to the parent star.

Penn State.

Within the immense cosmic expanse, a perplexing discovery has emerged—a planet that, by all technical expectations, should not exist.

Continue reading “Scientists spot oversized planet orbiting low-mass star for first time” »

The accelerator, an advanced wakefield laser accelerator, is under 20 feet long, generating a 10 billion electron-volt (10 GeV) electron beam.

Bjorn “Manuel” Hegelich, associate professor of physics at UT and CEO of TAU Systems, alluding to the size of the chamber where the beam was produced stated: “We can now reach those energies in 10 centimeters.”

Scientists are aiming to use this technology for assessing the resilience of space-bound electronics against radiation, capturing the 3D internal configurations of emerging semiconductor chip designs, and potentially pioneering new cancer treatments and advanced medical imaging methodologies.

Continue reading “Scientists make a laser accelerator with 10 billion electron-volt beam” »

Multifunctional computer chips have evolved to do more with integrated sensors, processors, memory and other specialized components. However, as chips have expanded, the time required to move information between functional components has also grown.

“Think of it like building a house,” said Sang-Hoon Bae, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. “You build out laterally and up vertically to get more function, more room to do more specialized activities, but then you have to spend more time moving or communicating between rooms.”

To address this challenge, Bae and a team of international collaborators, including researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yonsei University, Inha University, Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Notre Dame, demonstrated monolithic 3D integration of layered 2D material into novel processing hardware for artificial intelligence (AI) computing.

By strategically straining materials that are as thin as a single layer of atoms, University of Rochester scientists have developed a new form of computing memory that is at once fast, dense, and low-power. The researchers outline their new hybrid resistive switches in a study published in Nature Electronics.

Developed in the lab of Stephen M. Wu, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and of physics, the approach marries the best qualities of two existing forms of resistive switches used for memory: memristors and phase-change materials. Both forms have been explored for their advantages over today’s most prevalent forms of memory, including dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and flash memory, but they have their drawbacks.

Wu says that memristors, which apply voltage to a thin filament between two electrodes, tend to suffer from a relative lack of reliability compared to other forms of memory. Meanwhile, phase-change materials, which involve selectively melting a material into either an amorphous state or a crystalline state, require too much power.

Summary: Researchers used AI to select and generate images for studying brain’s visual processing. Functional MRI (fMRI) recorded heightened brain activity in response to these images, surpassing control images.

The approach enabled tuning visual models to individual responses, enhancing the study of brain’s reaction to visual stimuli. This method, offering an unbiased, systematic view of visual processing, could revolutionize neuroscience and therapeutic approaches.

Consciousness is probably the most perplexing mystery in all of science, and right now there is no consensus among neuroscientists about how the brain produc…

Shared with Dropbox.

Shared with Dropbox.

A recent study published in Nature discusses the confirmation of an exoplanetary system based on data collected in 2020. The system, known as HD 110,067, possesses six planets whose orbits are in resonance with each other, or “in sync”, meaning which could offer profound insights into the formation and evolution of planetary systems throughout the cosmos. All the planets exhibit sizes between Earth and Neptune, also known as sub-Neptunes, and was conducted by an international team of researchers using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency’s CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite (Cheops).

Artist illustration of the planets within the HD 110,067 system exhibiting orbital resonances with the colored lines depicting their resonances with each other. (Credit: CC BY-NC-SA, Thibaut Roger/NCCR PlanetS)

“This discovery is going to become a benchmark system to study how sub-Neptunes, the most common type of planets outside of the solar system, form, evolve, what are they made of, and if they possess the right conditions to support the existence of liquid water in their surfaces,” said Dr. Rafael Luque, who is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago and lead author of the study.