Posted in quantum physics, supercomputing | Leave a Comment on Quantum simulation breakthrough will lead to ‘discoveries impossible in today’s fastest supercomputers,’ Google scientists claim
By combining digital and analog quantum simulation into a new hybrid approach, scientists have already started to make fresh scientific discoveries using quantum computers.
Will the dream of interstellar travel soon become reality? Experts have been working for some time on concepts that will one day enable us to enter foreign star systems. Until now, the vast expanses of space have always thwarted this ambitious desire – after all, even the Alpha Centauri system, which is only 4.34 light-years away, is tens of thousands of travel years away with our current means! But now NASA has presented a revolutionary propulsion technology that should get us to the star system of our dreams in just 40 years! But how does the groundbreaking Sunbeam drive work? What technical tricks will make the vast distances of the cosmos seem forgotten – and when will the first interstellar research probe leave Earth?
Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI has introduced Grok 3, the latest version of its chatbot model, which Musk describes as the most advanced AI system yet.
XAI claims Grok 3 outperforms rival AI models from Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3, Anthropic’s Claude, and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in benchmarks for math, science, and coding.
Researchers found for the first time evidence that even microquasars containing a low-mass star are efficient particle accelerators, which leads to a significant impact on the interpretation of the abundance of gamma rays in the universe.
Our home planet is bombarded with particles from outer space all the time. And while we are mostly familiar with the rocky meteorites originating from within our solar system that create fascinating shooting stars in the night sky, it’s the smallest particles that help scientists to understand the nature of the universe. Subatomic particles such as electrons or protons arriving from interstellar space and beyond are one of the fastest particles known in the universe and known as cosmic rays.
The origins and the acceleration mechanisms of the most energetic of these cosmic particles remains one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. Fast-moving matter outflows (or “jets”) launched from black holes would be an ideal site for particle acceleration, but the details on how and under which conditions acceleration processes can occur are unclear. The most powerful jets inside our Galaxy occur in microquasars: systems composed by a stellar-mass black hole and a “normal” star. The pair orbit each other, and, once they are close enough, the black hole starts to slowly swallow its companion. As a consequence of this, jets are launched from the region close to the black hole.
A neuromorphic decoder for brain–computer interfaces that is based on a 128k-cell memristor chip can offer software-equivalent decoding performance and can adapt to changing brain signals.
You may think that time started 13.8 billion years ago at the birth of the universe, but physicists with alternative definitions of time have other ideas.
Video made with Kling 1.6, Gen-3 (Runway)
From images made with Frames (Runway)
Music by me (without ia wink only with the software Reacktor (Native Audio)
For some part of the Sound Design I used MMAudio (ia)
It’s a breakthrough in cancer treatment, and UChicago Medicine is one of the first hospitals to offer it.
It’s not just one treatment, but can eventually become a whole new way to treat cancer.
Alla Pinzour has been fighting skin cancer for around 15 years—but not anymore.
A recent study by Dr. Albert Jambon and his colleagues, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, revealed the presence of meteoric iron in Early Iron Age ornaments in Poland.
According to Dr. Jambon, the study was prompted by the desire to know the origin of iron smelting. “The point of my research is to find out who, when, and where the iron smelting was discovered. To that end, we need to analyze archaeological irons and check whether they are meteoritic or smelted.”
To do this, two Early Iron Age cemeteries and their iron artifacts, Częstochowa-Raków and Częstochowa-Mirów, both located in southern Poland, were analyzed.
Cells have surface receptors called integrins that bind to repetitive domains present on the extracellular matrix (ECM) surrounding the cells, allowing them to grow and spread. A new study from the Department of Bioengineering (BE), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and collaborators shows that tweaking the spacing between these binding domains on the ECM can boost the efficiency of ultrasound treatment applied to kill cancer cells.
“In a normal tissue, the spacing on the ECM is around 50–70 nanometers (nm), but in the tumor microenvironment, severe choking occurs due to excessive ECM secretion, which may reduce the binding spacing to below 50 nm,” explains Ajay Tijore, Assistant Professor in BE and corresponding author of a related study published in Nano Letters. “We found more cancer cells being killed when the binding spacing is increased to around 50–70 nm.”
Low-frequency ultrasound waves (39 kHz) can disrupt the cell membrane and trigger cell death in cancer cells. It is a relatively low-cost and non-invasive approach. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells do not have repair mechanisms that help them withstand the mechanical forces exerted by ultrasound waves.
