Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 24

Converting sunlight into electricity is the task of photovoltaic solar cells, but nearly half the light that reaches a flat silicon solar cell surface is lost to reflection. While traditional antireflective coatings help, they only work within a narrow range of light frequency and incidence angles. A new study may have overcome this limit.

As reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, researchers have proposed a new type of antireflective coating using a single, ultrathin layer of polycrystalline silicon nanostructures (a.k.a. a metasurface). Achieving minimal reflection across certain wavelengths and angles, the metasurface was reportedly developed by combining forward and inverse design techniques, enhanced by (AI).

The result is a coating that sharply reduces reflection across a wide range of wavelengths and angles, setting a new benchmark for performance with minimal material complexity.

Read more | >

A team led by Rice University bioscientist Caroline Ajo-Franklin has discovered how certain bacteria breathe by generating electricity, using a natural process that pushes electrons into their surroundings instead of breathing on oxygen.

The findings, published in Cell, could enable in clean energy and industrial biotechnology.

By identifying how these bacteria expel electrons externally, the researchers offer a glimpse into a previously hidden strategy of bacterial life. This work, which merges biology with electrochemistry, lays the groundwork for future technologies that harness the unique capabilities of these microscopic organisms.

Read more | >

Many diseases are caused by a missing or defective copy of a single gene. For decades, scientists have been working on gene therapy treatments that could cure such diseases by delivering a new copy of the missing genes to the affected cells.

Despite those efforts, very few gene therapy treatments have been approved by the FDA. One of the challenges to developing these treatments has been achieving control over how much the new gene is expressed in cells — too little and it won’t succeed, too much and it could cause serious side effects.

To help achieve more precise control of gene therapy, MIT engineers have tuned and applied a control circuit that can keep expression levels within a target range. In human cells, they showed that they could use this method to deliver genes that could help treat diseases including fragile X syndrome, a disorder that leads to intellectual disability and other developmental problems.

Read more | >

A nice brief paper comparing plasmid multimer formation in different strains of bacteria and identifying conditions under which such multimer formation occurs minimally. #biotech #synbio

Read more | >

The quantum black hole with (almost) no equations by Professor Gerard ‘t Hooft.

How to reconcile Einstein’s theory of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics is a notorious problem. Special relativity, on the other hand, was united completely with quantum mechanics when the Standard Model, including Higgs mechanism, was formulated as a relativistic quantum field theory.

Since Stephen Hawking shed new light on quantum mechanical effects in black holes, it was hoped that black holes may be used to obtain a more complete picture of Nature’s laws in that domain, but he arrived at claims that are difficult to use in this respect. Was he right? What happens with information sent into a black hole?

The discussion is not over; in this lecture it is shown that a mild conical singularity at the black hole horizon may be inevitable, while it doubles the temperature of quantum radiation emitted by a black hole, we illustrate the situation with only few equations.

About the Higgs Lecture.

The Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences is delighted to present the Annual Higgs Lecture. The inaugural Annual Higgs Lecture was delivered in December 2012 by its name bearer, Professor Peter Higgs, who returned to King’s after graduating in 1950 with a first-class honours degree in Physics, and who famously predicted the Higgs Boson particle.

Continue reading “Higgs Lecture 2025: The quantum black hole with (almost) no equations” | >

Check out the free AMD loaner offer. Test the Ryzen PRO laptops yourself and experience the benefits they can bring to your business:
https://tinyurl.com/4zwaxnfm.

Timestamps:
00:00 — New Semiconductor.
05:53 — New Chip.
11:09 — Breakthrough Results.
16:28 — Major Fabs looking into it.

Let’s connect on LinkedIn ➜ / anastasiintech.

#AMD #RYZENPRO

Read more | >