Lifeboat Foundation

Cremation diamonds: Here’s how science can give you an afterlife in the form of shiny compressed carbon.

The rich world is ageing fast. How can societies afford the looming costs of caring for their growing elderly populations? film supported by @mission.winnow.

00:00 The wealthy world is ageing.
01:17 Japan’s elderly population.
02:11 The problems of an ageing world.
04:01 Reinventing old age.
05:48 Unlocking the potential of older years.
07:09 Reforming social care.
08:20 A community-based approach.
11:08 A fundamental shift is needed.

Continue reading “The true costs of ageing” »

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured a captivating view of two actively forming young stars, known as Herbig-Haro 46/47.

Carbon nanotubes, large cylindrical molecules composed of hybridized carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal structure, recently attracted significant attention among electronics engineers. Due to their geometric configuration and advantageous electronic properties, these unique molecules could be used to create smaller field-effect transistors (FETs) that exhibit high energy efficiencies.

FETs based on carbon nanotubes have the potential to outperform smaller transistors based on silicon, yet their advantage in real-world implementations has yet to be conclusively demonstrated. A recent paper by researchers at Peking University and other institutes in China, published in Nature Electronics, outlines the realization of FETs based on carbon nanotubes that can be scaled to the same size of a 10 nm silicon technology node.

“Recent progress in achieving wafer-scale high density semiconducting carbon nanotube arrays brough us one step closer to the practical use of carbon nanotubes in CMOS circuits,” Zhiyong Zhang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, previous research efforts have mainly focused on the scaling of channel or gate length of carbon nanotube transistors while keeping large contact dimensions, which cannot be accepted for high density CMOS circuits in practical applications.

Powders of samples were weighed into precleaned Savillex beakers and dissolved with mixtures of 22 M HF and 14 M HNO₃ acids in a 2:1 volume ratio. The modern OIBs and four reference materials (that is, BHVO-2, BCR-2, AGV-2 and BIR-1) were digested on a hot plate at 120 °C for four days. Note that all chondrite and Archaean ultramafic/mafic rock samples were digested in Parr bomb vessels at 220 °C for three days to ensure full dissolution of refractory phases. Dissolution of the dried samples in 5–10 ml 6 M HCl at 120 °C and evaporation was carried out several times to decompose the fluorides formed from HF digestion until clear solutions were obtained. An aliquot of each sample was taken and spiked with a prepared ⁴⁷ Ti–⁴⁹ Ti double spike to determine in advance the Ti concentration using an iCAP RQ inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer at the Centre for Star and Planet Formation (StarPlan) at the University of Copenhagen. Afterwards, aliquots containing 6 µg Ti were taken and mixed with a ⁴⁷ Ti–⁴⁹ Ti double spike as described previously in ref. ³⁴. The dried mixtures were dissolved with 6 M HCl at 120 °C overnight to ensure sample–spike equilibration.

Titanium was separated from matrix elements following a three-step purification protocol using AG1x8 (200–400 meshes) and DGA resins^34,68, that is, first to separate Fe with 6 M HCl elution on AG1x8 columns, second to remove most of the major and trace elements through 12 M HNO₃ elution and to collect Ti with Milli-Q H₂O on DGA columns and third to purify Ti from the remaining matrix elements with 4 M HF cleaning on AG1x8 columns. An extra DGA pass can be carried out to remove trace amounts of Ca and Cr in the final Ti cuts. To destroy the resin particles and organics from column chemistry, the Ti cuts were treated with 14 M HNO₃ at 120 °C before storage in 0.5 M HNO₃ + 0.01 M HF acids.

Titanium isotopic compositions of the purified samples were measured using the ThermoFisher Scientific Neoma Multicollector ICP-MS. Sample solutions with 500–800 ppb Ti dissolved in 0.5 M HNO₃ + 0.01 M HF were introduced into the multicollector inductively coupled plasma source mass spectrometer by means of an APEX HF desolvating nebulizer from Elemental Scientific and a sapphire injector was used instead of the quartz-made injector to reduce the production of silicon fluorides from the use of HF solvent. An actively cooled membrane desolvation component was attached after the APEX to suppress oxide formation and to stabilize the signals, and N₂ gas at a flow rate of a few ml min⁻¹ was added to improve the sensitivity. Such a setting typically provides an intensity of around 15 V on ⁴⁸ Ti⁺ at an uptake rate of about 50 μl min⁻¹ for a 600-ppb Ti solution under a medium mass-resolution mode.

For many people, when they hear China and genetic engineering in the same sentence, it is often synonymous with scandal.

The two-dimensional layered crystal structure of niobium oxide polymorph T-Nb2O5 exhibits fast Li-ion diffusion that is promising for energy storage applications. Epitaxial growth of single-crystalline T-Nb2O5 thin films with ionic transport channels oriented perpendicular to the surface are now demonstrated.

The Quantum Insider (TQI) is the leading online resource dedicated exclusively to Quantum Computing.