Lifeboat Foundation

The main ring is surrounded by a faint halo and with many delicate structures. The interior of the ring is filled with hot gas. The star which ejected all this material is visible at the very center. It is extremely hot, with a temperature in excess (NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST Ring Nebula Team photo; image processing by Roger Wesson)

The images were released Thursday by an international team of astronomers, including three from the Canadian Western University’s Institute for Earth and Space Exploration.

Finding jellyfish fossils is “extremely rare” as the creatures are made up of roughly 95% water.

For a company the size of Amazon, it takes a lot to move the needle. It’s hard to enter new businesses that have enough upside to make a material difference. Advertising is one of them. With its recent change to break out results for its advertising business, Amazon is signaling it’s all in on staking its claim to as much of the market as it can.

That market is growing, but Amazon’s business is growing much faster. That means it’s taking share away from its competitors. Amazon is already the third-largest advertising platform. I wouldn’t bet against it someday soon becoming the biggest.

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Evolution doesn’t fix things — it reinvents them. A biologist explains.

Chemical structures called cyclopropanes can increase the potency and fine-tune the properties of many drugs, but traditional methods to create this structure only work with certain molecules and require highly reactive—potentially explosive—ingredients.

Now, a team of researchers from Penn State has identified and demonstrated a safe, efficient and practical way to create cyclopropanes on a wide variety of molecules using a previously undescribed chemical process. With additional development, the new method—described in a paper publishing Aug. 4 in the journal Science —could transform how this important process occurs during drug development and creation.

Cyclopropanes are a key feature in many drugs currently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, including those used to treat COVID-19, asthma, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDs. These structures can increase a drug’s potency, alter its ability to dissolve in the body, minimize its interactions with unintended targets, and otherwise fine-tune performance. Cyclopropanes are a ring of three connected carbon atoms, with one carbon attached to the rest of the drug molecule and the other two each attached to two hydrogen atoms.

Thermal field theory seeks to explain many-body dynamics at non-zero temperatures not considered in conventional quantum field theory.

The thermal field theory, as presented by Munshi G. Mustafa, bridges statistical mechanics and quantum field theory, simplifying the analysis of many-body systems and enhancing the understanding of high-energy collisions and early universe evolution.

Quantum field theory is a framework used by physicists to describe a wide range of phenomena in particle physics and is an effective tool to deal with complicated many-body problems or interacting systems.

There is a lot of speculation about the end of the universe. Humans love a good ending after all. We know that the universe started with the Big Bang and it has been going for almost 14 billion years. But how the curtain call of the cosmos occurs is not certain yet. There are, of course, hypothetical scenarios: the universe might continue to expand and cool down until it reaches absolute zero, or it might collapse back onto itself in the so-called Big Crunch. Among the alternatives to these two leading theories is “vacuum decay”, and it is spectacular – in an end-of-everything kind of way.

While the heat death hypothesis has the end slowly coming and the Big Crunch sees a reversal of the universe’s expansion at some point in the future, the vacuum decay requires that one spot of the universe suddenly transforms into something else. And that would be very bad news.

There is a field that spreads across the universe called the Higgs field. Interaction between this field and particles is what gives the particles mass. A quantum field is said to be in its vacuum state if it can’t lose any energy but we do not know if that’s true for the Higgs field, so it’s possible that the field is in a false vacuum at some point in the future. Picture the energy like a mountain. The lowest possible energy is a valley but as the field rolled down the slopes it might have encountered a small valley on the side of that mountain and got stuck there.

Macquarie University engineers have developed a new technique to make the manufacture of nanosensors far less carbon-intensive, much cheaper, more efficient, and more versatile, substantially improving a key process in this trillion-dollar global industry.

The team has found a way to treat each sensor using a single drop of ethanol instead of the conventional process that involves heating materials to high temperatures.

Their research, published in Advanced Functional Materials, is titled, ‘Capillary-driven self-assembled microclusters for highly performing UV detectors.’

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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TRANSCRIPT:
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