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Physicists have been trying to determine the ground states of 2D electron systems at extremely low densities and temperatures for many decades now. The first theoretical predictions for these ground states were put forward by physicists Felix Bloch in 1929 and Eugene Wigner in 1934, both of whom suggested that interactions between electrons could lead to ground states that had never been observed before.

Researchers at Princeton University have been conducting studies in this area of physics for several years now. Their most recent work, featured in Physical Review Letters, gathered evidence of a new state that had been predicted by Wigner, known as a disordered Wigner solid (WS).

“The phase predicted by Wigner, an ordered array of electrons (the so-called Wigner crystal or WS), has fascinated scientists for decades,” Mansour Shayegan, principal investigator for the study, told Phys.org. “Its experimental realization is extremely challenging, as it requires samples with very low densities and with appropriate parameters (large effective mass and small dielectric constant) to enhance the role of interaction.”

A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge, working with colleagues from the University of Turin and Zoomarine Italia, has found evidence of bottle-nosed dolphins having episodic memory recall. In their paper published in the journal Current Biology, the group outlines the experiments they conducted with the dolphins and what they learned from them.

Humans have what is known as episodic memory recall—we can remember not just data, or an image of something, but much of the things involved in an event. We can, for example, remember how a friend looked and what they said during a prior conversation. For many years, it was thought only humans had this capability but experiments with other creatures have shown otherwise. Some birds, fish, dogs and rats, have all been found to have some degree of episodic memory recall. In this new effort, the researchers noticed that bottle-nosed dolphins had not been tested to see if they too had the ability and because of that set themselves the task of doing so.

The experiments consisted of training eight dolphins to retrieve a ball held by a person at different spots around the edge of a pool and to ignore people in similar positions who were not holding a ball. As part of the training, the people were changed out to prevent the dolphins from associating the ball with a place or a given person. Next, the dolphins were asked to repeat the exercise, only this time the people held the ball behind their backs—the dolphins had to figure out who was holding the ball by searching their memory. All eight of the dolphins were trained and tested over two days and all of the dolphins were able to choose the correct spot or person with the ball, showing they could use the “where” part of their memory. And seven of eight got the second part right, which showed they could use the “who” part of their memory too.

Space is the coolest.

Outer space is already an essential part of America’s ability to fight wars. Our military depends on satellites for many things, such as communications, reconnaissance and targeting information. See more in Season 4, Episode 8, “Space Wars.”

#TheUniverse.

Continue reading “The Universe: Space Weapons Prepare for War (S4, E8) | Full Episode | History” »

An organism uses programmed cell death as a critical tool to maintain its health. Various stress responses are triggered when a cell does not operate as it should. These responses aim to bring back the original cell function.

One example is the process known as autophagy, in which a cell partly digests itself in order to acquire energy that it can utilize for its own repair. Should these efforts fail, the cell dies. This enables the body to combat conditions including infections, diabetes, cancer, and neurodegeneration.

A new hypothesis proposes that a large fraction of dark matter may be bound up inside tight balls the size of Neptune — so-called dark matter planets.

Nuclear power’s revival is being led by small modular reactor technology.

Small Modular Reactors or SMRs may revive the nuclear fission reactor industry around the world. These nuclear power plants are a fraction of the size of existing facilities. They take less time to build and have safety features that make a Fukushima or Chornobyl-like event next to impossible.

As the world pivots from burning fossil fuels to generating electricity and heat, SMRs may have a role to play to get the global economy to carbon neutrality or what is referred to as the net zero 2050 target date.

Continue reading “Small Modular Nuclear Quickly Becoming a Reality in the Quest for Net Zero” »

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The University of Innsbruck, Austria, realized a quantum computer that breaks out of this paradigm and unlocks additional computational resources, hidden in almost all of today’s quantum devices. Computers are well-known for operating with binary information, or zeros and ones, which has led to computers powering so much. This new approach results in more computational power with fewer quantum particles.

Quantum computers work with more than zero and one and digital computers work with zeros and ones, also called binary information. Quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. In fact, it was so successful that computers now power everything from coffee makers to self-driving cars, and it’s hard to imagine life without them. Restricting researchers to binary systems prevent these devices from living up to their true potential.

Continue reading “Quantum Computers can Look Beyond Zeros and Ones! Research Reveals” »

Unlike the moon’s surface, which heats up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) during the day and drops to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 173 degrees Celsius) at night, these lunar pits in the Mare Tranquillitatis region have a human-friendly, stable temperature.

(Mare Tranquillitatis, commonly known as the Sea of Tranquility, is where Apollo 11, the first mission to put humans on the moon, landed due to its smooth and relatively flat terrain.)

The data comes from an analysis of images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft and computer modeling.