Lifeboat Foundation

A New Zealand-based startup has developed a method of safely and wirelessly transmitting electric power across long distances without the use of copper wire, and is working on implementing it with the country’s second-largest power distributor.

The dream of wireless power transmission is far from new; everyone’s favorite electrical genius Nikola Tesla once proved he could power light bulbs from more than two miles away with a 140-foot Tesla coil in the 1890s – never mind that in doing so he burned out the dynamo at the local powerplant and plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into blackout.

Tesla’s dream was to place enormous towers all over the world that could transmit power wirelessly to any point on the globe, powering homes, businesses, industries and even giant electric ships on the ocean. Investor J.P. Morgan famously killed the idea with a single question: “where can I put the meter?”

Note: This post is co-authored with Stacy Li, a PhD student at Berkeley studying aging biology! Highly appreciate all her help in writing, editing, and fact-checking my understanding!

Some of these problems are as simple as factoring a large number into primes. Others are among the most important facing Earth today, like quickly modeling complex molecules for drugs to treat emerging diseases, and developing more efficient materials for carbon capture or batteries.

However, in the next decade, we expect a new form of supercomputing to emerge unlike anything prior. Not only could it potentially tackle these problems, but we hope it’ll do so with a fraction of the cost, footprint, time, and energy. This new supercomputing paradigm will incorporate an entirely new computing architecture, one that mirrors the strange behavior of matter at the atomic level—quantum computing.

For decades, quantum computers have struggled to reach commercial viability. The quantum behaviors that power these computers are extremely sensitive to environmental noise, and difficult to scale to large enough machines to do useful calculations. But several key advances have been made in the last decade, with improvements in hardware as well as theoretical advances in how to handle noise. These advances have allowed quantum computers to finally reach a performance level where their classical counterparts are struggling to keep up, at least for some specific calculations.

The improved gene-editing approach combines prime editors with a more efficient recombinase to insert or substitute gene-sized DNA segments.

Quantum computing is in all likelihood the 21st century’s great computer revolution. What is IBM doing to make the quantum dream a reality?

A permanent magnet begins to hover above a ceramic material as it cools and transitions to a superconducting state; the magnet remains aloft until the ceramic warms above a critical temperature.

The ceramic material is a 25mm disc of yttrium barium copper oxide (YBa2Cu3O7, also commonly referred to as \.

The new research centers on the use of LSPs to achieve atomic-level control of chemical reactions. A team has successfully extended LSP functionality to semiconductor platforms. By using a plasmon-resonant tip in a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope, they enabled the reversible lift-up and drop-down of single organic molecules on a silicon surface.

The LSP at the tip induces breaking and forming specific chemical bonds between the molecule and silicon, resulting in the reversible switching. The switching rate can be tuned by the tip position with exceptional precision down to 0.01 nanometer. This precise manipulation allows for reversible changes between two different molecular configurations.

An additional key aspect of this breakthrough is the tunability of the optoelectronic function through atomic-level molecular modification. The team confirmed that photoswitching is inhibited for another organic molecule, in which only one oxygen atom not bonding to silicon is substituted for a nitrogen atom. This chemical tailoring is essential for tuning the properties of single-molecule optoelectronic devices, enabling the design of components with specific functionalities and paving the way for more efficient and adaptable nano-optoelectronic systems.

The active zone primes synaptic vesicles and clusters voltage-gated Ca2+ channels fast neurotransmitter release. Here the authors dissect the underlying molecular architecture and show that distinct protein machineries execute these functions.

Forget Hollywood depictions of gun-toting robots running wild in the streets – the reality of artificial intelligence is far more dangerous, warns the historian and author in an exclusive extract from his new book.