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Metasurfaces, artificially engineered surfaces that can manipulate electromagnetic signals in unique ways, have huge potential for several technological applications, including the implementation of sixth generation (6G) cellular communications. The limitations and vulnerabilities of these smart surfaces, however, are still poorly understood.

Researchers at Peking University, University of Sannio and Southeast University recently carried out a study aimed at better understanding the vulnerability of metasurfaces to wireless cyber-attacks. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, outlines two types of attacks that should be considered and accounted for before metasurfaces can be deployed on a large-scale.

“This work was primarily driven by the need for enhancing security and privacy of in the upcoming 6G era, characterized by unprecedented speeds, ultra-low latency, and vast connection nodes,” Lianlin Li, Vincenzo Galdi and Tie Jun Cui, three of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore.

Tesla’s train at Giga Berlin will take roughly 4,500 employees to work every day and will commute on its route almost 60 times daily.

This week, Tesla confirmed it would use a shuttle connected to the public railway network running between Erkner Train Station and the Giga Berlin property to give both employees and citizens a public transportation option.

The shuttle will travel between the two stops nearly 60 times a day, and according to rbb24, it will bring “more than 1,500 employees directly to the factory at the change of shift alone.”

Short-lived proteins control gene expression in cells and execute critical roles ranging from assisting brain connectivity to fortifying the body’s immune response. Originating in the nucleus, these proteins are swiftly degraded after fulfilling their purpose.

For decades, the mechanism behind the degradation and removal of these essential proteins from cells remained a mystery to researchers — until now.

In a cross-departmental collaboration, researchers from Harvard Medical School identified a protein called midnolin that plays a key role in degrading many short-lived nuclear proteins. The study shows that midnolin does so by directly grabbing the proteins and pulling them into the cellular waste-disposal system, called the proteasome, where they are destroyed.

The successful transfer of a gene that produces HMW-HA paves the way for improving the health and lifespan of humans, too. In a groundbreaking endeavor, scientists at the University of Rochester have successfully transferred a longevity gene from naked mole rats to mice, leading to enhanced health and increased lifespan. Naked mole rats, noted for their resistance to age-related diseases, have a gene that produces high molecular weight hyaluronic acid (HMW-HA), which when introduced to mice, demonstrated potential anti-aging benefits.

Though these picojets may be small and last no more than 60 seconds, as Chitta pointed out, they are still powerful in their own right.

“The ‘pico’ prefix refers to the energy scale of the jet. The picoflare jets that we discovered are a trillion times energetically weaker compared to large X-class flares,” he said, X-class flares being the sun’s most powerful explosive outflows.

“Still,” he continued, “the energy content of a single picoflare jet that lives for about 1 minute is equal to the average power consumed by about 10,000 households in the UK over an entire year.”