Researchers at the University of Auckland identify platelet factor 4 (PF4) in young blood as a key player in reversing age-related cognitive decline in mice. The study offers a promising avenue for treating dementia-related conditions and enhancing brain function in aging populations.
Amnesty International’s Predator Files investigation traces the widespread abuse of spyware by some nations against their own citizens. The ops are “industrial scale.” @jaivijayan explains:
The Intellexa alliance has been using a range of tools for intercepting and subverting mobile and Wi-Fi technologies to deploy its surveillance tools, according to an investigation by Amnesty International and others.
With the successful development of the Jiuzhang 3.0 quantum computer prototype, which makes use of 255 detected photons, China continues to hold a world-leading position in the field of quantum computer research and development, lead scientists for the program told the Global Times on Wednesday.
The research team, composed of renowned quantum physicists Pan Jianwei and Lu Chaoyang from the University of Science and Technology of China in collaboration with the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, announced the successful construction of a 255-photon-based prototype quantum computer named Jiuzhang 3.0 early Wednesday morning.
The quantum computing feat accomplished by the team of talents achieves a speed that is 10 quadrillion times faster in solving Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) problems compared with the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The world’s massive human population is leveling off.
Most projections show we’ll hit peak humanity in the 21st century, as people choose to have smaller families and women gain power over their own reproduction. This is great news for the future of our species.
And yet alarms are sounding. While environmentalists have long warned of a planet with too many people, now some economists are warning of a future with too few. For example, economist Dean Spears from the University of Texas has written that an “unprecedented decline” in population will lead to a bleak future of slower economic growth and less innovation.
Experts used to believe that stress, sleep problems, and substance use contributed to chronic mental health issues in a cause-and-effect type of way. What we now know is that the relationship between these factors is more complicated, and circular in nature. Join a panel of University of Michigan Health experts to discuss the complex interplay between stress, sleep, and substance use. Learn about the multidisciplinary approach U-M experts are taking in response to the mental health crisis in America and how emerging technologies can play a role in managing these risk factors.
Inga-Av / iStock.
Now, Dr. Melvin Vopson, a physicist, is following up on such a theory and investigating a new law of physics to support the idea that our reality might be a computer simulation, according to a statement by the University of Portsmouth.
The first people to make and use quantum dots were glassmakers. Working thousands of years ago, they realized that the same chemical mixture could turn glass into different colors, depending on how they heated it.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors three scientists who, along with their colleagues, students, and staff, figured out why the ancient glassmakers’ methods worked — and how to control them much more precisely. During the waning days of the Cold War, Alexei Ekimov and Louis Brus, working in separate labs on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, both discovered the same thing: that tiny crystals (just millionths of a millimeter wide) act very differently than larger pieces of the exact same material. These tiny, weird crystals are called quantum dots, and just a few years after the Berlin Wall fell, Moungi Bawendi figured out how to mass-produce them.
That changed everything. Quantum dots are crystals so small that they follow different rules of physics than the materials we’re used to. Today, these tiny materials help surgeons map different types of cells in the body, paint vivid color images on QLED screens, and give LED lights a warmer glow.
Scientists have just caught up with something that Scandinavians have suspected strongly for over a century: Ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) may be a basic taste, joining sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.
Denizens of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands gobble up the compound in “salmiak,” a salt licorice candy. But don’t be fooled by the “candy” label. As Andrew Richdale wrote for Saveur back in 2017, salmiak tastes nothing like any other candy you have ever tried.
“The first time I sampled salmiak… I spit it out on a Copenhagen street corner. It wasn’t that this powerful little pastille was bad. It’s just that my taste buds had never quite been lit up that way: smacked with a layer of sharp and sour salt dust, then soothed by something bitter and caramel-sweet. It felt simultaneously fascinating and… abusive? Or at least odd, like a knocked funny bone.”
Posted in space
Oct. 5, 2023: (Spaceweather.com) The sun is about to lose something important: Its magnetic poles.
Recent measurements by NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory reveal a rapid weakening of magnetic fields in the polar regions of the sun. North and south magnetic poles are on the verge of disappearing. This will lead to a complete reversal of the sun’s global magnetic field perhaps before the end of the year.
An artist’s concept of the sun’s dipolar magnetic field. Credit: NSF/AURA/NSO.
Researchers have developed an easy-to-use optical chip that can configure itself to achieve various functions. The positive real-valued matrix computation they have achieved gives the chip the potential to be used in applications requiring optical neural networks. Optical neural networks can be used for a variety of data-heavy tasks such as image classification, gesture interpretation and speech recognition.
Photonic integrated circuits that can be reconfigured after manufacturing to perform different functions have been developed previously. However, they tend to be difficult to configure because the user needs to understand the internal structure and principles of the chip and individually adjust its basic units.
“Our new chip can be treated as a black box, meaning users don’t need to understand its internal structure to change its function,” said research team leader Jianji Dong from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. “They only need to set a training objective, and, with computer control, the chip will self-configure to achieve the desired functionality based on the input and output.”
