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After successful recommissioning in autumn 2022, the Greifswald nuclear fusion experiment has surpassed an important target. In 2023, an energy turnover of 1 gigajoule was targeted. Now the researchers have even achieved 1.3 gigajoules and a new record for discharge time on Wendelstein 7-X: the hot plasma could be maintained for eight minutes.

During the three-year completion work that ended last summer, Wendelstein 7-X was primarily equipped with water cooling for the wall elements and an upgraded heating system. The latter can now couple twice as much power into the as before. Since then, the experiment can be operated in new parameter ranges.

What do a T-shirt, a rug, and a soda bottle have in common? Many are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a ubiquitous plastic that revolutionized the materials industry after it was patented in the 1940s.

Created from petroleum refining, PET is a material known for its durability and versatility. It is easily molded into airtight containers, woven into durable carpets, or spun into polyester clothing.

“The reality is that most PET products—especially PET clothing and carpeting—are not recycled today using conventional technologies,” explained Gregg Beckham, senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and CEO of the U.S. Department of Energy BOTTLE Consortium. “The is developing promising alternatives, including enzymes designed to depolymerize PET, but even these options have tended to lean on energy-intensive and costly preprocessing steps to be effective.”

A breakthrough regarding dendrites made by MIT researchers may finally open the way to the building of a new type of rechargeable lithium battery that is safer, lighter, and more compact than existing models, a concept that has been pursued by labs all over the world for years.

The replacement of the liquid electrolyte between the positive and negative electrodes with a considerably thinner, lighter layer of solid ceramic material and the replacement of one electrode with solid lithium metal are the two essential components of this prospective advancement in battery technology. By making these changes, the battery’s overall size and weight would be significantly reduced, and the flammable liquid electrolytes that provide a safety risk would be eliminated. Dendrites, however, have proven to be a significant obstacle in that pursuit.

Dendrites are metal growths that can accumulate on the lithium surface, pierce through the solid electrolyte, and finally cross from one electrode to the other, shorting out the battery cell. Their name is from the Latin word for branches. There hasn’t been much advancement in the understanding of what causes these metal filaments or how to stop them from occurring, making lightweight solid-state batteries a problematic alternative.

By Ankita Chakravarti: ChatGPT, which is the fastest growing app in the world, has competition now. After Microsoft’ Bing and Google’s Bard AI, Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees, has launched a new AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT. The company claims that Claude is “easier to converse with” “more steerable.” and “much less likely to produce harmful outputs,”

Claude performs pretty well and has the same functions as the ChatGPT. “Claude can help with use cases including summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, coding, and more. Early customers report that Claude is much less likely to produce harmful outputs, easier to converse with, and more steerable — so you can get your desired output with less effort. Claude can also take direction on personality, tone, and behavior,” the company said in a blog post.

Anthrophic is offering Claude in two different variants including the Claude and Claude Instant. The company explains that Claude is a “state-of-the-art high-performance model”, while Claude Instant is a “lighter, less expensive, and much faster option.” “We plan to introduce even more updates in the coming weeks. As we develop these systems, we’ll continually work to make them more helpful, honest, and harmless as we learn more from our safety research and our deployments,” the blog read.

Over the course of its nearly 14-billion-year journey, the light from the CMB has been stretched, squeezed and warped by all the matter in its way. Cosmologists are beginning to look beyond the primary fluctuations in the CMB light to the secondary imprints left by interactions with galaxies and other cosmic structures. From these signals, they’re gaining a crisper view of the distribution of both ordinary matter — everything that’s composed of atomic parts — and the mysterious dark matter. In turn, those insights are helping to settle some long-standing cosmological mysteries and pose some new ones.

“We’re realizing that the CMB does not only tell us about the initial conditions of the universe. It also tells us about the galaxies themselves,” said Emmanuel Schaan, also a cosmologist at SLAC. “And that turns out to be really powerful.”