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Hyperion, a California-based company, has unveiled a hydrogen-powered supercar the company hopes will change the way people view hydrogen fuel cell technology.

The Hyperion XP-1 will be able to drive for up to 1,000 miles on one tank of compressed hydrogen gas and its electric motors will generate more than 1,000 horsepower, according to the company. The all-wheel-drive car can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in a little over two seconds, the company said.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric cars that use hydrogen to generate power inside the car rather than using batteries to store energy. The XP-1 doesn’t combust hydrogen but uses it in fuel cells that combine hydrogen with oxygen from the air in a process that creates water, the vehicle’s only emission, and a stream of electricity to power the car.

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In the fifth decade of life, our brains start to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated over the ensuing decades. ⁠ https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/great-brain-rewiring-after-age-40/ Big Think.

In a systematic review published last year in the journal Psychophysiology, researchers from Monash University in Australia swept through the scientific literature, seeking to summarize how the connectivity of the human brain changes over our lifetimes. The gathered evidence suggests that in the fifth decade of life (that is, after a person turns 40), the brain starts to undergo a radical “rewiring” that results in diverse networks becoming more integrated and connected over the ensuing decades, with accompanying effects on cognition.

Since the turn of the century, neuroscientists have increasingly viewed the brain as a complex network, consisting of units broken down into regions, sub-regions, and individual neurons. These units are connected structurally, functionally, or both. With increasingly advanced scanning techniques, neuroscientists can observe the parts of subjects’ brains that “light up” in response to stimuli or when simply at rest, providing a superficial look at how our brains are synced up.

The Monash University team pored over 144 studies that used these imaging techniques to probe the brains of tens of thousands of subjects. From this analysis, the researchers gleaned a general trend in how the networked brain changes over our lifetimes.

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New research from a Western University postdoctoral fellow shows the early lunar crust, which makes up the surface of the moon, was considerably enriched in water more than 4 billion years ago, counter to previously held understanding. The discovery is outlined in a study published today (Jan. 15) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Working with a meteorite she classified as one that came from the while a graduate student at The Open University (U.K.), Tara Hayden identified, for the first time, the mineral apatite (the most common phosphate) in a sample of early lunar crust.

The research offers exciting new evidence that the moon’s early crust contained more water than was originally thought, opening new doors into the study of lunar history.

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Bipolar membranes (BPMs) are a class of ion-exchange membranes typically comprising a cation-and an anion-exchange layer. While these membranes have recently been integrated in various electrochemical devices for a wide range of application, the processes underlying their operation are not yet fully understood.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) recently developed a new mechanistic model that explains the forward bias polarization mechanisms of BPMs in mixed electrolytes with varying acidities and basicities. Their model, introduced in Nature Energy, could guide the development of strategies to overcome the issue of ionic blockades, which can adversely impact the performance of forward bias BPM devices.

“We were initially trying to design an electrolyzer that converts carbon dioxide CO2 into useful feedstocks or fuels using bipolar membranes (BPMs),” Yogesh Surendranath, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “To provide a little context, CO2 electrolyzers are most efficient when operating with alkaline electrolyte solutions such as , but because CO2 is an acid gas, it reacts with alkaline solutions to produce carbonate solutions over time.”

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Many physicists and engineers have been trying to develop highly efficient quantum technologies that can perform similar functions to conventional electronics leveraging quantum mechanical effects. This includes high-dimensional quantum memories, storage devices with a greater information capacity and noise resilience than two-dimensional quantum memories.

So far, developing these high-dimensional memories has proved challenging, and most attempts have not yielded satisfactory efficiencies. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, a research team at University of Science and Technology of China and Hefei Normal University recently introduced an approach to realize a highly efficient 25-dimensional based on cold atoms.

“Our group has been using the orbital angular momentum mode in the space channel to study high-dimensional quantum and has accumulated a wealth of research experience and technology,” Dong Sheng Ding, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “Achieving high-dimensional and high-efficiency quantum storage has always been our goal.”

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A new study in Nature Communications investigates the electrical tuning of branched light flow in nematic liquid crystal (NLC) films, revealing controlled patterns and statistical characteristics with potential applications in optics and photonics.

Branched light flow manifests as intricate patterns in light waves navigating through a disordered medium, forming multiple branching pathways.

Positioned between ballistic and diffusive transport phenomena—where ballistic implies unhindered straight-line movement akin to a , and diffusive involves scattered, chaotic behavior—the phenomenon gains significance for its potential in controlling physical processes, particularly optics, and photonics.

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Within atomic and laser physics communities, scientist John “Jan” Hall has become a key figure in the history of laser frequency stabilization and precision measurement using lasers. Hall’s work revolved around understanding and manipulating stable lasers in ways that were revolutionary for their time. His work laid a technical foundation for measuring a tiny fractional distance change brought by a passing gravitational wave. His work in laser arrays awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2005.

Building on this foundation, JILA and NIST Fellow Jun Ye and his team embarked on an ambitious journey to push the boundaries of precision measurement even further. This time, their focus turned to a specialized technique known as the Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) method (developed by scientists R. V. Pound, Ronald Drever, and Hall himself), which plays a large role in precision optical interferometry and laser stabilization.

While physicists have used the PDH method for decades in ensuring their laser frequency is stably “locked” to an artificial or quantum reference, a limitation arising from the frequency modulation process itself, called residual amplitude modulation (RAM), can still affect the stability and accuracy of the laser’s measurements.

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Solid-state qubits: Forget about being clean, embrace mess, says a new recipe for dense arrays of qubits with long lifetimes.

New findings debunk previous wisdom that solid-state qubits need to be super dilute in an ultra-clean material to achieve long lifetimes. Instead, cram lots of rare-earth ions into a crystal and some will form pairs that act as highly coherent qubits, shows a paper in Nature Physics.

Clean lines and minimalism, or vintage shabby chic? It turns out that the same trends that occupy the world of interior design are important when it comes to designing the building blocks of quantum computers.

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Recent research highlights the dual role of VEGF-C-producing macrophages in breast tumors, potentially guiding metastasis to less harmful areas, opening new avenues for targeted cancer therapies.

A new study from Karolinska Institutet published in Cell reports shows that tumor-associated macrophages, which are white blood cells that are found in breast tumors, can both help and hinder the spread of cancer cells to other organs. The researchers found that macrophages that produce a substance called VEGF-C reduce the spread of breast cancer to the lungs but increase the spread to the lymph nodes. This may have implications for the prognosis and treatment of breast cancer.

Understanding breast cancer and the role of tams.

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JWST’s recent observations of two quasars from the universe’s infancy reveal crucial insights into the early relationship between black holes and their galaxies, echoing mass ratios seen in the more recent universe.

New images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed, for the first time, starlight from two massive galaxies hosting actively growing black holes – quasars – seen less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The black holes have masses close to a billion times that of the Sun, and the host galaxy masses are almost one hundred times larger, a ratio similar to what is found in the more recent universe. A powerful combination of the wide-field survey of the Subaru Telescope and the JWST has paved a new path to study the distant universe, reports a recent study in Nature.

Observations of giant black holes have attracted the attention of astronomers in recent years. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has started to image the “shadow” of black holes at the galaxy centers. The 2020 Novel Prize in Physics was awarded to stellar motion observations at the heart of the Milky Way. While the existence of such giant black holes has become solid, no one knows their origin.

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