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Sep 15, 2022

New phases of water detected

Posted by in category: futurism

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have discovered that water in a one-molecule layer acts like neither a liquid nor a solid, and that it becomes highly conductive at high pressures.

Sep 15, 2022

Scientists “See” Spinning Quasiparticles in a 2D Magnet

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

New research reveals that spinning quasiparticles, or magnons, light up when paired with a light-emitting quasiparticle, or exciton, with potential quantum information applications.

All magnets contain spinning quasiparticles called magnons. This is true of all magnets from the simple souvenirs hanging on your refrigerator to the discs that give your computer memory storage to the powerful versions used in research labs. The direction one magnon spins can influence that of its neighbor, which in turn affects the spin of its neighbor, and so on, yielding what are known as spin waves. Spin waves can potentially transmit information more efficiently than electricity, and magnons can serve as “quantum interconnects” that “glue” quantum bits together into powerful computers.

Although magnons have enormous potential, they are often difficult to detect without bulky pieces of lab equipment. According to Columbia researcher Xiaoyang Zhu, such setups are fine for conducting experiments, but not for developing devices, such as magnonic devices and so-called spintronics. However, seeing magnons can be made much simpler with the right material: a magnetic semiconductor called chromium sulfide bromide (CrSBr) that can be peeled into atom.

Sep 15, 2022

Aubrey de Grey: scientist who says humans can live for 1,000 years

Posted by in category: life extension

Hugo Cox.

At the end of a winding dirt track off Bear Creek Road, a few miles from Los Gatos in California’s Santa Cruz mountains is the home of Aubrey de Grey, the 53-year-old English research scientist from whom the claim originates. It looks exactly like the place you would expect a mad professor to live.

Sep 15, 2022

Humanity’s Transition to Superintelligence

Posted by in categories: economics, transhumanism

Sustensis is a Think Tank providing inspirations, suggestions, and solutions for Humanity’s transition to the time when it will coexist with Superintelligence. In some way it falls into a broad spectrum of Transhumanism. However, we only consider certain aspects of Transhumanism, emphasizing technological progress, which may ultimately lead to the emergence of a new species – Posthumans. Thus for us “Transhumanism is about Humanity’s transition to its coexistence with Superintelligence until it evolves into a new species”. Such a transition must start with an urgent reform of democracy, promoting a planetary outlook, and evolving the most mature organisation, such as the European Union, into a Human Federation. That is covered by our subsidiary website Euro Agora.

Our websites have been designed using our own Digitized Structured Content. It can be used for debating complex political, social, scientific or economic problems. On this website it is focused on minimizing the risk of developing a malicious Superintelligence, which requires a global co-operation. Similarly, as in a book, the Content (in this case – the problem area) is described in chapters. As you move from left to right, the numbered top level tabs describe the problem in more detail.

Continue reading “Humanity’s Transition to Superintelligence” »

Sep 15, 2022

World’s first direct air electrolyzer makes hydrogen from humidity

Posted by in categories: chemistry, solar power, sustainability

Australian researchers have developed and tested a way to electrolyze hydrogen straight out of the air, anywhere on Earth, without requiring any other fresh water source. The Direct Air Electrolyzer (DAE) absorbs and converts atmospheric moisture – even down to a “bone-dry” 4% humidity.

Such a machine could be particularly relevant to a country like Australia, which has ambitions as a clean energy exporter, along with enormous solar energy potential – but also widespread drought conditions and limited access to clean water. Decoupling hydrogen production from the need for a water supply could allow green hydrogen to be produced more or less anywhere you can ship it out from – and since water scarcity and solar potential often go hand in hand, this could prove a boon for much of Africa, Asia, India and the Middle East, too.

Chemical engineers at Melbourne University came up with what they describe as a simple design: an electrolyzer with two flat plates acting as anode and cathode. Sandwiched between the two plates is a porous material – melamine sponge, for example, or sintered glass foam. This medium is soaked in a hygroscopic ionic solution – a chemical that can absorb moisture from the air spontaneously.

Sep 15, 2022

How Special Is Our Solar System?

Posted by in category: space

& Culture features content from over 2000 leading museums and archives who have partnered with the Google Cultural Institute to bring the world’s treasures online.

Sep 15, 2022

Breakthrough reported in machine learning-enhanced quantum chemistry

Posted by in categories: chemistry, information science, quantum physics, robotics/AI

The equations of quantum mechanics provide a roadmap to predicting the properties of chemicals starting from basic scientific theories. However, these equations quickly become too expensive in terms of computer time and power when used to predict behavior in large systems. Machine learning offers a promising approach to accelerating such large-scale simulations.

Researchers have shown that machine learning models can mimic the basic structure of the fundamental laws of nature. These laws can be very difficult to simulate directly. The machine learning approach enables predictions that are easy to compute and are accurate in a wide range of chemical systems.

The improved machine learning model can quickly and accurately predict a wide range of properties of molecules (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Deep Learning of Dynamically Responsive Chemical Hamiltonians with Semi-Empirical Quantum Mechanics”). These approaches score very well on important benchmarks in computational chemistry and show how deep learning methods can continue to improve by incorporating more data from experiments. The model can also succeed at challenging tasks such as predicting excited state dynamics—how systems behave with elevated energy levels.

Sep 14, 2022

Protein-eating cancer cells can be made to starve themselves, research is showing

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists from the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg and the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna have joined forces to try to…

Sep 14, 2022

China Discovers Stunning Crystal on the Moon, Nuclear Fusion Fuel for Limitless Energy

Posted by in categories: nuclear energy, space

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs. China has discovered a crystal from the Moon made of a previously unknown…

Sep 14, 2022

Voices: Alarm bells are going off across the world — but we’re barely listening

Posted by in category: habitats

Sometimes it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. We spend so much time on what’s in front of us, we can miss the bigger picture. Alarm bells are going off across the world. We need to hear them.

An extreme heatwave and drought has been roasting China for 70 days straight, something that “has no parallel in modern record-keeping in China, or elsewhere around the world for that matter.”

Next door, in Pakistan, a “torrential downpour of biblical proportions” has so far killed 900 people and destroyed nearly 100,000 homes. Its neighbour India has suffered 200 heatwave days this year so far, compared to just 32 last year. South Korea received it’s the heaviest hourly downpour in Seoul for 80 years, flooding the capital and leaving 50 cities and towns with landslide warnings.