Scientists have discovered yet another amazing aspect of the weird and wonderful behavior of water—this time when subjected to nanoscale confinement at sub-zero temperatures.
The finding that a crystalline substance can readily give up water at temperatures as low as −70 °C, published in the journal Nature on April 12, has major implications for the development of materials designed to extract water from the atmosphere.
A team of supramolecular chemists at Stellenbosch University (SU), consisting of Dr. Alan Eaby, Prof. Catharine Esterhuysen and Prof. Len Barbour, made this discovery while trying to understand the peculiar behavior of a type of crystal that first piqued their interest about ten years ago.
Researchers at Texas A&M University have discovered a novel circuit element referred to as a meminductor that led to a significant breakthrough in circuit elements.
In an electrical circuit, circuit elements play a crucial role in managing the flow of electricity. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor are the traditional circuit elements, while the memristor and memcapacitor are the more recent additions discovered in the past 15 years. These newer components, known as “mem-” versions of the classical elements, have different voltage and current characteristics that are influenced by previous voltage or current values over time, giving them memory-like properties.
Dr. H. Rusty Harris, an Associate Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, has made a significant breakthrough in circuit elements with the discovery of a new component called the meminductor.
The robot tasked with making bricks out of lunar soil will be launched during China’s Chang’e-8 mission around 2028.
With Artemis II set to launch on November 24, it is no surprise that science journals are buzzing with research on lunar regolith, building bases on the moon, and working with moon soil to grow plants… you get the drift.
A recent study in the journal Communications Biology described an experiment in which the moon soil samples collected during the Apollo missions were used to grow plants. And for the first time, an Earth plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called thale cress, grew and thrived in the lunar soil samples during the experiment.
This one-of-a-kind robot is an exobiology extant life surveyor (EELS) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
It is time to move over the traditional wheeled or legged robots. NASA has developed a robotic concept that sounds straight out of a science-fiction and has the potential to take space exploration to the next level.
The US space agency has been working on sending a snake-like robot to explore and search for extraterrestrial life forms in the solar system. This robot is an exobiology extant life surveyor (EELS) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The snake-like robot’s capabilities.
NASA/JPL-CalTech.
Scientists have been working on sending a snake-like robot to explore and search for extraterrestrial life forms in the solar system. This robot is an exobiology extant life surveyor (EELS) developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
Debugging a faulty program can be frustrating, so why not let AI do it for you? That’s what a developer that goes by “BioBootloader” did by creating Wolverine, a program that can give Python programs “regenerative healing abilities,” reports Hackaday. (Yep, just like the Marvel superhero.)
GPT-4 is a multimodal AI language model created by OpenAI and released in March, available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers and in API form to beta testers. It uses its “knowledge” about billions of documents, books, and websites scraped from the web to perform text-processing tasks such as composition, language translation, and programming.
Incubating The UAE National Space Program — H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri — Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center
H.E. Salem Humaid Al Marri, is Director General, Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), in Dubai, UAE, which is an advanced scientific and technological hub, responsible for making the UAE a world leader in space services and exploration.
Established in 2006, MBRSC started out with five engineers but since then, the center has significantly expanded on a journey to be the incubator of the UAE National Space Program, building, developing, and operating a number of Earth observation satellites, providing imaging services and analysis, as well as producing relevant data to scientific communities and research centers around the world. Among the satellites that the center operates are DubaiSat-1 & DubaiSat-2. The MBRSC is also responsible for KhalifaSat, celebrated as the first satellite that was fully built by Emiratis in 2018. Recently, the center revealed its plan to develop the new satellite MBZ-SAT, which is expected to be launched at the end of 2023 and to be the latest in the field of high-resolution imaging from outer space.
Mr. Al Marri’s role is centered on ensuring that the vision and mission of MBRSC are achieved through the different technical and scientific programs being run at the Center and has previously held the same position at the Emirates Institution for Advanced Science and Technology (EIAST) before it was integrated into the Center. He is currently overseeing the expansion of the Center in different scientific and technical fields along with the center’s continued development in the space field, and working towards ensuring all initiatives at MBRSC serve the stakeholders with useful value added services, with one of his major goals ensuring the achievement of domestic satellite development through Emirati engineers.
Mr. Al Marri’s has over 10 years experience in the Space Field, was part of the team which setup EIAST and MBRSC, was formally the Director of the Space Program Department at (EIAST), and he was the Project Manager for MBRSC’s earlier satellite projects DubaiSat-1 and DubaiSat-2.
The ATLAS collaboration, the large research consortium involved in analyzing data collected by the ATLAS particle collider at CERN, recently observed the electroweak production of two Z bosons and two jets. This crucial observation, presented in Nature Physics, could greatly contribute to the understanding of standard model ℠ particle physics.
The SM of particle physics is a well-established theory describing the building blocks and fundamental forces in the universe. This model describes weak bosons (i.e., bosons responsible for the so-called ‘weak force’) as mediators of the electroweak interaction.
The scattering of massive weak bosons, such as W and Z bosons, is constrained specifically to interactions, where the mediators directly interact and scatter off each other. This scattering, also known as vector-boson scattering (VBS), also involves a type of Feynman diagrams or vertices known (i.e., quartic gauge vertices) that physicists have so far been unable to experimentally probe through other physical processes.
Before undergoing surgeries and other invasive medical procedures, patients typically undergo anesthesia. Anesthesia consists in giving patients a class of drugs (i.e., anesthetics) that cause them to lose feeling in specific areas of the body (i.e., local anesthesia) or fully lose awareness during a procedure (i.e., general anesthesia). These anesthetics can be administered to patients via injection, inhalation, skin-numbing lotions, and other means.
In the past, doctors and medical researchers viewed general anesthesia as a passive process that could not be influenced or interrupted once anesthetic drugs were administered. More recently, however, studies showed that it is in fact an active brain process that can be experimentally controlled and acted on.
A research team at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China recently carried out a study investigating the processes underpinning brain states while under general anesthesia and those associated with the subsequent re-emergence of awareness. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, highlight possible strategies that could help anesthesiologists to extend and deepen or shorten periods of anesthesia.
Online romance fraud is an increasingly common phenomenon, which can affect people of all ages worldwide. This type of fraud occurs when a malicious individual or members of a criminal organization engage with users online pretending to be romantically interested in them, while trying to trick them into sending money or sharing confidential information with them.
Online romance scams can have a detrimental effect on a victim’s life, causing them to spend all their savings, become indebted, and even be subjected to blackmail or identity theft. A team of researchers at Abertay University in the U.K. recently reviewed existing literature focusing on romance fraud and then summarized some of the most recurring findings in a paper pre-published on arXiv.
“Romance fraud has been growing over the last decade or so and was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic which saw a surge in cybercrime and cyberattacks,” Dr. Lynsay Shepherd, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Our paper provides a comprehensive overview of romance fraud research, which could serve as a starting point for future research in the field.”
