Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have taken a significant step towards the development of tailor-made chiral nanocarriers with controllable release properties. These nanocarriers, inspired by nature’s helical molecules like DNA and proteins, hold immense potential for targeted drug delivery and other biomedical applications.

The study, led by Professors Emilio Quiñoá and Félix Freire at the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS), highlights the intricate relationship between the structure of helical polymers and their self-assembly into nanospheres. By carefully designing the secondary chain, the researchers were able to modulate the acidity of the polymers, influencing their aggregation patterns and leading to the formation of nanoespheres with varying densities.

Intriguingly, the size of these nanospheres could be precisely controlled by simply adjusting the water-to-solvent ratio during their preparation, eliminating the need for stabilizers. This eco-friendly approach paves the way for sustainable synthesis of these particles.

Ferromagnetism is an important physical phenomenon that plays a key role in many technologies. It is well-known that metals such as iron, cobalt and nickel are magnetic at room temperature because their electron spins are aligned in parallel — and it is only at very high temperatures that these materials lose their magnetic properties.

Researchers led by Professor Richard Warburton of the Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute of the University of Basel have shown that molybdenum disulfide also exhibits ferromagnetic properties under certain conditions. When subjected to low temperatures and an external magnetic field, the electron spins in this material all point in the same direction.

In their latest study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters (“Exchange energy of the ferromagnetic electronic ground state in a monolayer semiconductor”), the researchers determined how much energy it takes to flip an individual electron spin within this ferromagnetic state. This “exchange energy” is significant because it describes the stability of the ferromagnetism.

Physicists have struggled to understand the nature of time since the field began. But a new theoretical study suggests time could be an illusion woven at the quantum level.

But when it comes to the origin of the Universe, we don’t know what forces are at play. We actually can’t know, since to know such force (or better, such fields and their interactions) would necessitate knowledge of the initial state of the Universe. And how could we possibly glean information from such a state in some uncontroversial way? In more prosaic terms, it would mean that we could know what the Universe was like as it came into existence. This would require a god’s eye view of the initial state of the Universe, a kind of objective separation between us and the proto-Universe that is about to become the Universe we live in. It would mean we had a complete knowledge of all the physical forces in the Universe, a final theory of everything. But how could we ever know if what we call the theory of everything is a complete description of all that exists? We couldn’t, as this would assume we know all of physical reality, which is an impossibility. There could always be another force of nature, lurking in the shadows of our ignorance.

At the origin of the Universe, the very notion of cause and objectivity get entangled into a single unknowable, since we can’t possibly know the initial state of the Universe. We can, of course, construct models and test them against what we can measure of the Universe. But concordance is not a criterion for certainty. Different models may lead to the same concordance — the Universe we see — but we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them since they come from an unknowable initial state. The first cause — the cause that must be uncaused and that unleashed all other causes — lies beyond the reach of scientific methodology as we know it. This doesn’t mean that we must invoke supernatural causes to fill the gap of our ignorance. A supernatural cause doesn’t explain in the way that scientific theories do; supernatural divine intervention is based on faith and not on data. It’s a personal choice, not a scientific one. It only helps those who believe.

Still, through a sequence of spectacular scientific discoveries, we have pieced together a cosmic history of exquisite detail and complexity. There are still many open gaps in our knowledge, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise. The next decades will see us making great progress in understanding many of the open cosmological questions of our time, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, and whether gravitational waves can tell us more about primordial inflation. But the problem of the first cause will remain open, as it doesn’t fit with the way we do science. This fact must, as Einstein wisely remarked, “fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility.” Not all questions need to be answered to be meaningful.

Google’s Sycamore quantum computer was the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy – solving calculations that would be unfeasible on a classical computer – but now ordinary machines have pulled ahead again.

By Matthew Sparkes

Camera, A., Tabetah, M., Castañeda, V. et al. Aging and putative frailty biomarkers are altered by spaceflight. Sci Rep 14, 13,098 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-57948-5

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Northrop Grumman has released a photo of the Series Hybrid Electric Propulsion AiRcraft Demonstration (SHEPARD) XRQ-73 stealth drone X-plane that it has built for DARPA and is expected to fly by the end of the year.

Part of DARPA’s X-Prime program, the XRQ-73A is a demonstrator prototype built by Northrop Grumman and Scaled Composites. The flying wing design is based on the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Great Horned Owl (GHO), an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) program, which used a blended wing design and external ducted push propellers.

In contrast, the XRQ-73A is larger and stealthier. With a wingspan of well over 30 ft (9 m), it weighs in at 1,250 lb (567 kg) and can reach speeds of 250 kn (287 mph, 463 km/h) at an altitude of 18,000 ft (5,500 m) with a payload of 400 lb (180 kg).

Astronomers have identified the largest and most distant water reservoir ever detected in the universe. This immense collection of water, equivalent to 140 trillion times the water in Earth’s oceans, surrounds a quasar over 12 billion light-years away.

“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” stated Matt Bradford from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laborator y. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.” Bradford leads one of the teams behind this groundbreaking discovery. Their research, partially funded by NASA, appears in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are powered by enormous black holes that consume surrounding gas and dust, emitting vast amounts of energy. The quasar in question, APM 08279+5255, harbors a black hole 20 billion times more massive than the sun and produces energy equivalent to a thousand trillion suns.

Like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, sometimes small and minute changes can lead to big and unexpected results and changes in our lives. Recently, a team of researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) made a very small change to develop a material called “spin-orbit torque (SOT),” which is a hot topic in next-generation DRAM memory.

This research team, led by Professor Daesu Lee and Yongjoo Jo, a PhD candidate, from the Department of Physics and Professor Si-Young Choi from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at POSTECH, achieved highly efficient field-free (i.e. SOT magnetization switching that does not require the assistance of a magnetic field) SOT magnetization switching through atom-level control of composite oxides.

Their findings were recently published in Nano Letters (“Field-Free Spin–Orbit Torque Magnetization Switching in a Single-Phase Ferromagnetic and Spin Hall Oxide”).