Nothing sucks more than a supermassive black hole, but according to a group of researchers, the enormous objects found at the heart of many galaxies may be driving the expansion of the cosmos.
The radical claim comes from an international team who compared growth rates of black holes in different galaxies. They conclude that the spread of masses observed could be explained by black holes bearing cores of “dark energy”, the mysterious force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Large language models still struggle with basic reasoning tasks. Two new papers that apply machine learning to math provide a blueprint for how that could change.
“The inevitability of death is what makes life worth living.” — Henry.
“Would we need to extend the years everyone should continue to be in the workforce, in order to pay for those not contributing?” — Marianne.
“Imagine you have people with all the prejudices they grew up with and they never die. Or you have someone who is a dictator and they get to live forever and be dictator forever. Or you have Congress where you have 80 and 90 year olds holding office forever but now they never die so nobody new can take over.” — Avram.
Posted in futurism, quantum physics
As “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” hits theaters, learn about the future of quantum and NSF efforts to advance the quantum future.
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The game-changing neutron star merger of August 2017 created a ‘perfect’ explosion, according to a new study.
The blast behind the historic gravitational wave astronomy discovery of August 2017 had a perfect spherical shape, according to a new study.
Over the past few years, material scientists and electronics engineers have been trying to fabricate new flexible inorganic materials to create stretchable and highly performing electronic devices. These devices can be based on different designs, such as rigid-island active cells with serpentine-shape/fractal interconnections, neutral mechanical planes or bunked structures.
Despite the significant advancements in the fabrication of stretchable materials, some challenges have proved difficult to overcome. For instance, materials with wavy or serpentine interconnect designs commonly have a limited area density and fabricating proposed stretchable materials is often both difficult and expensive. In addition, the stiffness of many existing stretchable materials does not match that of human skin tissue, making them uncomfortable on the skin and thus not ideal for creating wearable technologies.
Researchers at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have recently fabricated a vacuum-deposited elastic polymer for developing stretchable electronics. This material, introduced in Nature Electronics, could be used to create stretchy field-effect transistors (FETs), which are primary components of most electronic devices on the market today.
In a new approach to security that unites technology and art, EPFL researchers have combined silver nanostructures with polarized light to yield a range of brilliant colors, which can be used to encode messages.
Cryptography is something of a new field for Olivier Martin, who has been studying the optics of nanostructures for many years as head of the Nanophotonics and Metrology Lab EPFL’s School of Engineering. But after developing some new silver nanostructures in collaboration with the Center of MicroNanoTechnology, Martin and Ph.D. student Hsiang-Chu Wang noticed that these nanostructures reacted to polarized light in an unexpected way, which just happened to be perfect for encoding information.
They found that when polarized light was shone through the nanostructures from certain directions, a range of vivid and easily-identifiable colors was reflected back. These different colors could be assigned numbers, which could then be used to represent letters using the electronic communication standard code ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). To encode a secret message, the researchers applied a quaternary code using the digits 0, 1, 2 and 3 (as opposed to the more commonly used binary code 0 and 1). The result was a series of four-digit strings composed of different color combinations that could be used to spell out a message, and the method of chromo-encryption was born.
Astronomers spotted auroras for the first time on two of the biggest Galilean moons of Jupiter. New features of Io and Europa’s auroras have also been discovered.
Previously Unseen Auroras Dazzling Over Galilean Jupiter Moons
The Space Academy reports that these previously unseen auroras can be spotted when an eclipse takes place.
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, in partnership with WHO and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted Catastrophic Contagion, a pandemic tabletop exercise at the Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, on October 23, 2022.
The extraordinary group of participants consisted of 10 current and former Health Ministers and senior public health officials from Senegal, Rwanda, Nigeria, Angola, Liberia, Singapore, India, Germany, as well as Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The exercise simulated a series of WHO emergency health advisory board meetings addressing a fictional pandemic set in the near future. Participants grappled with how to respond to an epidemic located in one part of the world that then spread rapidly, becoming a pandemic with a higher fatality rate than COVID-19 and disproportionately affecting children and young people.
