Lifeboat Foundation

We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks—global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.

Now a Northwestern University research team has discovered a ubiquitous property of a complex network and developed a novel computational method that is the first to systematically exploit that property to control the whole network using only local information. The method considers the computational time and information communication costs to produce the optimal choice.

The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities. In such dynamic networks, gathering and processing all the information necessary to make a better decision can take too much time. The goal is to diagnose a problem and take action before it leads to a system-wide issue. This may mean having less information but being timely.

A recent study from the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and published in Wa | Chemistry And Physics.

This study is intriguing since one of the results of climate change is increasing water temperatures, so removing phosphorus from such waters will prove invaluable in the future, with this study appropriately being referred to as a “future-proof” method.

Continue reading “New ‘future-proof’ method could remove phosphorus from wastewater using bacteria” »

Flipkart-owned Cleartrip, a flight booking platform, said that it suffered a major data breach in its internal systems.

In an email to customers, the company stated, “This is to inform you that there has been a security anomaly that entailed illegal and unauthorised access to a part of Cleartrip’s internal systems.”

However, the travel company assured them that no sensitive information pertaining to a user’s account had been compromised due to this incident, apart from a few personal details.

Shockwaves caused by asteroids colliding with Earth create materials with a range of complex carbon structures, which could be used for advancing future engineering applications, according to an international study led by UCL and Hungarian scientists.

Published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team of researchers has found that diamonds formed during a high-energy shock wave from an asteroid collision around 50,000 years ago have unique and exceptional properties, caused by the short-term high temperatures and extreme pressure.

The researchers say that these structures can be targeted for advanced mechanical and electronic applications, giving us the ability to design materials that are not only ultra-hard but also malleable with tunable electronic properties.

New research led by University of Massachusetts Amherst assistant professor Jinglei Ping has overcome a major challenge to isolating and detecting molecules at the same time and at the same location in a microdevice. The work, recently published in ACS Nano, demonstrates an important advance in using graphene for electrokinetic biosample processing and analysis, and could allow lab-on-a-chip devices to become smaller and achieve results faster.

The process of detecting biomolecules has been complicated and time-consuming. “We usually first have to isolate them in a complex medium in a device and then send them to another device or another spot in the same device for detection,” says Ping, who is in the College of Engineering’s Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department and is also affiliated with the university’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences. “Now we can isolate them and detect them at the same microscale spot in a microfluidic device at the same time—no one has ever demonstrated this before.”

His lab achieved this advance by using graphene, a one-atom-thick honeycomb lattice of carbon atoms, as microelectrodes in a microfluidic device.

Particles can move as waves along different paths at the same time—this is one of the most important findings of quantum physics. A particularly impressive example is the neutron interferometer: neutrons are fired at a crystal, the neutron wave is split into two portions, which are then superimposed on each other again. A characteristic interference pattern can be observed, which proves the wave properties of matter.

Such neutron interferometers have played an important role for precision measurements and fundamental physics research for decades. However, their size has been limited so far because they worked only if carved from a single piece of crystal. Since the 1990s, attempts have also been made to produce interferometers from two separate crystals—but without success. Now a team from TU Wien, INRIM Turin and ILL Grenoble has achieved precisely this feat, using a high-precision tip-tilt platform for the crystal alignment. This opens up completely new possibilities for quantum measurements, including research on quantum effects in a gravitational field.

Human brains process loads of information. When wine aficionados taste a new wine, neural networks in their brains process an array of data from each sip. Synapses in their neurons fire, weighing the importance of each bit of data—acidity, fruitiness, bitterness—before passing it along to the next layer of neurons in the network. As information flows, the brain parses out the type of wine.

Scientists want artificial intelligence (AI) systems to be sophisticated data connoisseurs too, and so they design computer versions of neural networks to process and analyze information. AI is catching up to the human brain in many tasks, but usually consumes a lot more energy to do the same things. Our brains make these calculations while consuming an estimated average of 20 watts of power. An AI system can use thousands of times that. This hardware can also lag, making AI slower, less efficient and less effective than our brains. A large field of AI research is looking for less energy-intensive alternatives.

Now, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Applied, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their collaborators have developed a new type of hardware for AI that could use less energy and operate more quickly—and it has already passed a virtual wine-tasting test.

The 6 million-square-foot Samsung plant will be located south of Highway 79 and southwest of Downtown Taylor, near Taylor High School. It is expected to bring 1,800 jobs to Williamson County.

The plant is expected to start operations in 2024. The City of Taylor, Williamson County and Taylor ISD all already have economic agreements in place related to Samsung’s development.

Continue reading “Report: Samsung adding land to $17B semiconductor campus in Taylor” »

The latest Food Security and Nutrition in the World report reveals the extent of global hunger, with the number of malnourished people has increased for the sixth year in a row.