Lifeboat Foundation

Mechanical systems are highly suitable for realizing applications such as quantum information processing, quantum sensing and bosonic quantum simulation. The effective use of these systems for these applications, however, relies on the ability to manipulate them in unique ways, specifically by ‘squeezing’ their states and introducing nonlinear effects in the quantum regime.

A research team at ETH Zurich led by Dr. Matteo Fadel recently introduced a new approach to realize quantum squeezing in a nonlinear mechanical oscillator. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could have interesting implications for the development of quantum metrology and sensing technologies.

“Initially, our goal was to prepare a mechanical squeezed state, namely a quantum state of motion with reduced quantum fluctuations along one phase-space direction,” Fadel told Phys.org. “Such states are important for quantum sensing and quantum simulation applications. They are one of the gates in the universal gate set for quantum computing with continuous-variable systems—meaning mechanical degrees of freedom, electromagnetic fields, etc., as opposed to qubits that are discrete-variable systems.”

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.

With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.

If it ever gets built, it will dwarf all existing supercomputers.

Researchers have designed a copper nanocluster-based catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into useful methane.

This 2D cooling system can deliver 100mK temperatures.

Researchers from Germany, Italy, and the UK have achieved a major advance in the development of materials suitable for on-chip energy harvesting. By composing an alloy made of silicon, germanium and tin, they were able to create a thermoelectric material, promising to transform the waste heat of computer processors back into electricity.

With all elements coming from the 4th main group of the periodic table, these new semiconductor alloy can be easily integrated into the CMOS process of chip production. The research findings are published in ACS Applied Energy Materials.

The increasing use of electronic devices in all aspects of our lives is driving up energy consumption. Most of this energy is dissipated into the environment in the form of heat.

Potentially great news for a power grid in fear of AI over-demand.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have developed a potentially transformative approach to treating Alzheimer’s disease, A team from the former Cellular and Molecular Synaptic Function Unit have reported significant progress in reversing cognitive decline and restoring memory in transgenic mice using a synthetic protein. The findings, published in Brain Research, offer hope for a viable treatment to alleviate the debilitating symptoms associated with this neurodegenerative condition.

“We successfully reversed the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice,” explained Dr Chia-Jung Chang, first author of the study and presently a member of the Neural Computation Unit at OIST. “We achieved this with a small, synthetic peptide, PHDP5, that can easily cross the blood-brain barrier to directly target the memory center in the brain [1].”

Longevity. Technology: There is a pressing need to find effective treatments for Alzheimer’s; along with other forms of dementia, this debilitating disease currently affects approximately 55 million people worldwide, and this number is predicted to nearly double every 20 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050. As well as a health burden, Alzheimer’s is an economic burden – the annual global cost of dementia has now rocketed to more than US$1.3 trillion, with a projected rise to US$2.8 trillion by 2030 on the horizon [2].

Taking inspiration from the animal kingdom, Flinders University researchers are developing affordable, flexible and highly responsive ‘whiskers’ to attach to robots. Their article, “Optimising electromechanical whisker design for contact localisation,” has been published in the journal Sensors and Actuators A: Physical.

While lasers and camera vision is used to instruct robot movement, the additional support of light-weight, cheap and flexible whiskers would give workplace and domestic robots additional tactile abilities in confined or cluttered spaces.

Like a rat’s whiskers, these sensors can be used to overcome a robot’s range-finder or camera blind spots which may not ‘see’ or register an object close by, says Flinders College of Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate Simon Pegoli. Additionally, whiskers uncover properties of objects, such as moveability, not possible with camera or regular range-finder sensors.