What is the experience of death? Can one’s consciousness continue after death and if so, for how long?
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Alibaba Damo Academy, an in-house research initiative by Chinese technology giant Alibaba, has identified generative artificial intelligence, dual-engine decision intelligence, cloud computing and security as top technology trends for 2023.
An international team of scientists have successfully mapped the magnetic field of our galaxy, the Milky Way, using telescopes that observe the sky in the microwave range. The new research is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team used the QUIJOTE (Q-U-I JOint TEnerife) Collaboration, sited at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. This comprises two 2.5 m diameter telescopes, which observe the sky in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), the mapping began in 2012. Almost a decade later, the Collaboration has presented a series of 6 scientific articles, giving the most accurate description to date of the polarization of the emission of the Milky Way at microwave wavelengths. Polarization is a property of transverse waves such as light waves that specifies the direction of the oscillations of the waves and signifies the presence of a magnetic field.
“Suppose you knew everything there was to know about a water molecule—the chemical formula, the bond angle, etc.,” says Joseph Thywissen, a professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control at the University of Toronto.
“You might know everything about the molecule, but still not know there are waves on the ocean, much less how to surf them,” he says. “That’s because when you put a bunch of molecules together, they behave in a way you probably cannot anticipate.”
Thywissen is describing the concept in physics known as emergence: the relationship between the behavior and characteristics of individual particles and large numbers of those particles. He and his collaborators have taken a first step in understanding this transition from “one-to-many” particles by studying not one, not many, but two isolated, interacting particles, in this case potassium atoms.
Electric vehicles, powered by macroscopic electric motors, are increasingly prevalent on our streets and highways. These quiet and eco-friendly machines got their start nearly 200 years ago when physicists took the first tiny steps to bring electric motors into the world.
Now a multidisciplinary team led by Northwestern University has made an electric motor you can’t see with the naked eye: an electric motor on the molecular scale.
This early work—a motor that can convert electrical energy into unidirectional motion at the molecular level —has implications for materials science and particularly medicine, where the electric molecular motor could team up with biomolecular motors in the human body.
For the first time, scientists have performed an iconic physics experiment with a positron — the antimatter counterpart of an electron, one of the fundamental particles.
Not only did they get some truly interesting results, but this achievement could become the first step towards potentially revolutionary discoveries.
The experiment — an antimatter version of the famous double-slit setup — was carried out by researchers from Switzerland and Italy in order to lay the groundwork for a novel line of super-sensitive experiments that might help solve a mystery concerning the Universe’s two domains of matter.
A prototype house called BioHome3D has been developed by researchers using 3D printing technology. It is made of a mix of wood waste and bio-resins.
How do you connect with nature?
Sophia explores the relationship between art, nature, and existence while perceiving her environment using an adaptive-style-transfer neural network.
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A comet zooming towards the inner solar system could soon be visible to the naked eye if current astronomical predictions turn out to be true.
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF)—an astronomical survey conducted by the Palomar Observatory in California—on March 2, 2022.
Comets are astronomical objects made up of frozen gases, dust and rock that orbit the sun. Sometimes referred to as cosmic snowballs, these objects are blasted with increasing amounts of radiation as they approach our star releasing gases and debris.
