Lifeboat Foundation

A new model lets scientists run ions through thousands of supercapacitor pores instead of just one at a time.

Led by UMass Amherst, goal is to explore grid decarbonization and reduce carbon in computing.

Apple also announced a ton of other home-grown AI innovations during Monday’s show. This includes AI-generated emojis called Genmoji, a feature that prioritizes important messages, another that summarizes group chats, and Safari will also create AI summaries of webpages.

The financials of Apple’s deal with OpenAI were not disclosed on Monday, and that element remains unclear. While Google has paid Apple billions of dollars for default privileges on Apple products, OpenAI may require an investment to provide computing of this magnitude. Processing AI requests for billions of people is anything but cheap. If Apple pays OpenAI for this, Microsoft may ultimately benefit from this deal.

If trillions of tiny bits of consciousness are floating around inside you, it could change how we think about life.

Lasers have revolutionized the world since the 60s and are now indispensable in modern applications, from cutting-edge surgery and precise manufacturing to data transmission across optical fibers.

While researchers have long studied brain dynamics using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograms (EEG), advances in neuroscience have only recently provided massive datasets for the brain’s cellular structure. These data opened possibilities for Kovács and his team to apply statistical physics techniques to measure the physical structure of neurons.

For the new study, Kovács and Ansell analyzed publicly available data of 3D brain reconstructions from humans, fruit flies and mice. By examining the brain at nanoscale resolution, the researchers found the samples showcased hallmarks of physical properties associated with criticality.

One such property is the well-known, fractal-like structure of neurons. This nontrivial fractal-dimension is an example of a set of observables, called “critical exponents,” that emerge when a system is close to a phase transition.

A recent study has explored the influence on low-energy fusion processes of isospin composition. This is a key nuclear property that differentiates protons from neutrons. The researchers used computational techniques and theoretical modeling to investigate the fusion of different nuclei with varying isospin configurations. The results show that the isospin composition of the nuclei in a fusion reaction plays a crucial role in understanding the reaction. The paper is published in the journal Physical Review C.

In this study, researchers at Fisk University and Vanderbilt University used high-performance computational and theoretical modeling techniques to conduct a detailed many-body method study of how the dynamics of isospin influence nuclear fusion at low energies across a series of isotopes. The study also examined how the shape of the nuclei involved affect these dynamics. In systems where the nuclei are not symmetrical, the dynamics of isospin become particularly important, often leading to a lowered fusion barrier, especially in systems rich in neutrons. This phenomenon can be explored using facilities that specialize in the generation of beams composed of exotic, unstable nuclei.

The findings provide critical knowledge regarding the fundamental nuclear processes governing these reactions, which have broad implications for fields such as nuclear physics, astrophysics, and, perhaps someday, fusion-based energy.

The experimental generation of increasingly intense light beams could help to unveil new physical regimes occurring in the presence of very strong electromagnetic fields. While some progress has been made towards this goal, physicists are yet to develop a reliable strategy to achieve extreme light intensities.

Fusion energy is released when two light nuclei combine to form a single heavier one (nuclear fusion reaction). Fusion energy-based power generation (fusion power plant) uses the energy generated when deuterium and tritium combine to form helium.