Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 3

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Light-powered chip harvests energy, computes and senses chemicals in one stack

Most contemporary portable electronics, including laptops, smartphones and smart watches, are powered by batteries that need to be recharged daily or every few days. Over the past decade, however, some engineers have been exploring the possibility of developing battery-free electronic devices that autonomously derive electricity from renewable sources, such as sunlight, indoor lighting or heat.

A research team at Penn State University recently developed a compact integrated circuit (IC) that harvests energy solely from ambient light, using this energy to run computations and sense chemicals in its surroundings. This new chip, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could enable the development of devices that never require charging and thus continue working uninterrupted even in environments where replacement batteries and electrical sockets are not available.

“This work grew out of a broader question we have been asking in my group: Can we build electronic systems that do not simply sense information, but also process that information locally and power themselves from their environment?” Saptarshi Das, senior author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Many future Internet of Things (IoT) and edge-computing systems will need to operate in remote or hard-to-access locations, where replacing batteries is impractical. We wanted to demonstrate a compact, fully integrated chip that combines energy harvesting, sensing and computation in a single monolithic three-dimensional architecture.”

Optimizing RNA design with AI and an Ising machine: Encoding matters

RNA has emerged as one of the most promising molecules in modern medicine, enabling advances from mRNA vaccines and gene therapies to genome editing and synthetic biology. However, designing RNA molecules that reliably fold into a desired secondary structure remains a major challenge. Even for relatively short sequences, the number of possible nucleotide combinations grows exponentially, making it difficult to identify optimal candidates. As a result, conventional computational methods often require extensive candidate evaluations, creating a significant bottleneck when experimental validation is both time-consuming and costly.

To address this challenge, researchers from Keio University, led by Project Lecturer Shuta Kikuchi of the Graduate School of Science and Technology and Professor Shu Tanaka of the Department of Applied Physics and Physico-Informatics, developed a novel RNA inverse folding framework based on factorization machine with quadratic optimization annealing (FMQA). This machine learning– and Ising machine–driven black-box optimization approach is designed to identify high-quality RNA sequence candidates with relatively few evaluations.

“We investigated a new application of FMQA in biomolecular design, where its potential remains relatively unexplored. Since RNA, DNA and protein sequences are inherently categorical in nature, it is unclear how converting them into binary representations affects optimization performance. In this study, we examined RNA inverse folding and the influence of different encoding and assignment choices within FMQA,” says Dr. Kikuchi. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Catching hydrogen in the act: Tracking the absorption process over time

If you’re looking for hydrogen on the elemental chart, it won’t take you long to find it. It is right there at the beginning, the lightest possible material. One electron, one proton, one neutron. Simple, minimalistic, the Marie Kondo of the elemental chart, but with enormous potential in terms of possible technological applications.

A very prominent example interests every single one of us: Let’s look into the daytime sky.

If we think of the sun as a furnace, then hydrogen atoms are the coal ingots.

Why some glasses break suddenly while others deform smoothly

If a liquid is cooled slowly to its freezing point, it becomes a crystal in which the constituent particles are arranged in an ordered pattern. In contrast, when the liquid is cooled very quickly, the particles are unable to arrange themselves in an ordered fashion, and it becomes glass. Glassy materials are all around us in everyday life. Common examples include window glass, certain metal alloys, polymers, foams, gels and even soft materials like emulsions and colloids.

These materials can behave very differently when an external force is applied to them, such as bending, stretching or compressing. Some materials change shape slowly and smoothly under strain (this property is called ductility). Some materials may resist deformation at first but then suddenly break or crack without warning (this property is called brittleness). Whether a material bends or breaks determines how safely and reliably it can be used in everyday objects and engineering applications.

Scientists broadly classify glasses into two types: strong and fragile glasses.

Space sensor could spot hidden nuclear weapons in orbit with 99% accuracy

In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit—the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface—would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet and more.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.

Fractional Fermi Sea: Physicists Discover a New Phase of Matter Beyond Established Theory

Scientists have engineered a never-before-seen quantum state, uncovering a new phase of matter with hidden order beyond conventional theory.

Researchers have shown that an unusual quantum state known as a “fractional Fermi sea” can be deliberately created, opening the door to a previously unknown phase of matter. The work, published in Physical Review Letters, was carried out by the Nägerl group together with theoretical collaborator Alvise Bastianello of the CNRS and Université Paris-Dauphine. The study provides the theoretical foundation for recent experimental work led by Hans-Christoph Nägerl’s group in the Department of Experimental Physics.

Creating a New Quantum State.

/* */