Lifeboat Foundation

What if we could find a way to make electric currents flow, without energy loss? A promising approach for this involves using materials known as topological insulators. They are known to exist in one (wire), two (sheet) and three (cube) dimensions; all with different possible applications in electronic devices.

Theoretical physicists at Utrecht University, together with experimentalists at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, have discovered that topological insulators may also exist at 1.58 dimensions, and that these could be used for energy-efficient information processing. Their study was published in Nature Physics.

Classical bits, the units of computer operation, are based on electric currents: electrons running means 1, no electrons running means 0. With a combination of 0’s and 1’s, one can build all the devices that you use in your daily life, from cellphones to computers. However, while running, these electrons meet defects and impurities in the material, and lose energy. This is what happens when your device gets warm: the energy is converted into heat, and so your battery is drained faster.

Number theorists have been trying to prove a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers for more than 160 years.

By Manon Bischoff

The Riemann hypothesis is the most important open question in number theory—if not all of mathematics. It has occupied experts for more than 160 years. And the problem appeared both in mathematician David Hilbert’s groundbreaking speech from 1900 and among the “Millennium Problems” formulated a century later. The person who solves it will win a million-dollar prize.

OpenAI says GPT-4o can be used to teach you a language and a new demo video seems to prove them right.

Tesla Gigafactory Berlin has probably become the most fun factory among the company’s facilities worldwide. While Giga Berlin plays a huge part in ramping Tesla’s output globally, the electric vehicle maker also seems determined to ensure that the facility’s employees are well supported. This means that if employees need to destress, they would not need to go too far.

With this in mind, it appears that Giga Berlin has launched an in-house “rave cave” of sorts. The facility’s teaser was posted by Tesla’s official Tesla Manufacturing account, which, strangely enough, shared its post with a hamster emoji. Amidst scenes of employees entering the apparent “rave cave” from a futuristic narrow tunnel, images of a cyber-hamster mascot could also be seen.

19 D-shaped magnetic coils that will make up the core of ITER now arrived in France, to begin construction of the tokamak.

Daedalus could have learned a thing or two from a team of physicists in the UK and Switzerland.

Taking principles from fractal geometry and the strategic game of chess, they have created what they say is the most fiendishly difficult maze ever devised.

Led by physicist Felix Flicker of the University of Bristol in the UK, the group has generated routes called Hamiltonian cycles in patterns known as Ammann-Beenker tilings, producing complex fractal mazes that, they say, describe an exotic form of matter known as quasicrystals.

Adenosine-to-inosine editing is a form of RNA modification observed in the human brain transcriptome. Here the authors question the accuracy of utilizing postmortem samples to reflect the RNA biology of living brains. This is due to significant differences in adenosine-to-inosine editing between living and postmortem brain tissues, with most sites exhibiting higher editing levels postmortem.

An interesting way of punishment.

Or maybe just something Wallace and Gromit might jam onto a rocket for a second Grand Day Out.