Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Space travel has brought us to our next-door neighbor, the moon, and to the depths of our larger solar community inhabited by giants such as Saturn and Jupiter.

In 1982, Voyager 2 whisked past Uranus closer than any other spacecraft has since, and now is sailing—46 years after its launch—through the constellation of Pavo, some 179 from Earth.

But there have been few comparable satellite missions in recent years. Cost is the main obstacle, but time frame is also a factor. The design for such long journeys takes years to calculate, and planning and construction of a space vehicle would take about a decade. Factoring in the time a satellite would require to reach distant targets means our next peek into the stars will likely not come any time soon.

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An international team of researchers from Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), the University of Twente (Netherlands), and the start-up company QuiX Quantum has presented an entangled quantum light source fully integrated for the first time on a chip. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature Photonics.

“Our breakthrough allowed us to shrink the source size by a factor of more than 1,000, allowing reproducibility, stability over a longer time, scaling, and potentially mass-production. All these characteristics are required for real-world applications such as ,” says Prof. Dr. Michael Kues, head of the Institute of Photonics, and board member of the Cluster of Excellence PhoenixD at Leibniz University Hannover.

Quantum bits () are the basic building blocks of quantum computers and the quantum internet. Quantum light sources generate light quanta (photons) that can be used as . On-chip photonics has become a leading platform for processing optical quantum states as it is compact, robust, and allows to accommodate and arrange many elements on a . Here, light is directed on the chip through extremely compact structures, which are used to build photonic quantum computing systems. These are already accessible today through the cloud. Scalably implemented, they could solve tasks that are inaccessible to conventional computers due to their limited computing capacities. This superiority is referred to as quantum advantage.

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The nanoscale electronic parts in devices like smartphones are solid, static objects that once designed and built cannot transform into anything else. But University of California, Irvine physicists have reported the discovery of nanoscale devices that can transform into many different shapes and sizes even though they exist in solid states.

It’s a finding that could fundamentally change the nature of , as well as the way scientists research atomic-scale quantum materials. The study is published in Science Advances.

“What we discovered is that for a particular set of materials, you can make nanoscale electronic devices that aren’t stuck together,” said Javier Sanchez-Yamagishi, an assistant professor of physics & astronomy whose lab performed the new research. “The parts can move, and so that allows us to modify the size and shape of a device after it’s been made.”

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Perturbing electron spins in a magnet usually results in excitations called “spin waves” that ripple through the magnet like waves on a pond that’s been struck by a pebble. In a new study, Rice University physicists and their collaborators have discovered dramatically different excitations called “spin excitons” that can also “ripple” through a nickel-based magnet as a coherent wave.

In a study published in Nature Communications, the researchers reported finding unusual properties in nickel molybdate, a layered magnetic crystal. Subatomic particles called electrons resemble miniscule magnets, and they typically orient themselves like compass needles in relation to magnetic fields. In experiments where neutrons were scattered from magnetic nickel ions inside the crystals, the researchers found that two outermost electrons from each nickel ion behaved differently. Rather than aligning their spins like compass needles, the two canceled one another in a phenomenon physicists call a spin singlet.

“Such a substance should not be a magnet at all,” said Rice’s Pengcheng Dai, corresponding author of the study. “And if a neutron scatters off a given nickel ion, the excitations should remain local and not propagate through the sample.”

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Make a template based on a 1980s virtual reality game, create 25 AI characters, give them personalities and histories, equip them with memory, and throw in some ChatGPT—and what do you get?

A pretty impressive representation of a functioning society with compelling, believable human interactions.

That’s the conclusion of six from Stanford University and Google Research who designed a Sims-like environment to observe the daily routines of inhabitants of an AI-generated virtual town.

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A popular and easy method for validating whether or not a chunk of rock is a meteorite, and what kind of meteorite it is, has been inadvertently erasing invaluable information locked inside.

The use of rare-earth magnets such as neodymium erases and overwrites the magnetic record locked inside ferromagnetic minerals in meteorites, scientists from MIT in the US and Paris Cité University in France found. Since many meteorites that fall to Earth have a significant iron content, this means we’re losing important data on the way magnetic fields in space have altered these meteorites over billions of years.

Meteorites provide invaluable records of planetary formation and evolution. Studies of their paleomagnetism have constrained accretion in the protoplanetary disk, the thermal evolution and differentiation of planetesimals, and the history of planetary dynamos.

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Researchers at UC Davis are the first to report how a specific type of brain cells, known as oligodendrocyte-lineage cells, transfer cell material to neurons in the mouse brain. Their work provides evidence of a coordinated nuclear interaction between these cells and neurons. The study was published today in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

“This novel concept of material transfer to neurons opens new possibilities for understanding brain maturation and finding treatments for neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease,” said corresponding author Olga Chechneva is an assistant project scientist at UC Davis Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and independent principal investigator in the Institute for Pediatric Regenerative Medicine at Shriners Children’s Northern California.

Oligodendrocyte-lineage , also called oligodendroglia, are a type of glial cells found in the central nervous system. From birth onward, these glial cells arise to support neural circuit maturation. They are mostly known for their role in myelination—the formation of the insulating myelin sheath around nerve axons.

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Chinese hackers could also attack the networks of companies that provide services to the military or to critical infrastructure operators, holding their systems hostage for ransom payments.

“If you get the right supply chain, it can have a lot of effects against a lot of targets,” said John Hultquist, head of Mandiant Intelligence Analysis at Google Cloud.

China is viewed as one of the most dangerous nations in cyberspace, and its cyber espionage operations are among some of the U.S. government’s top cyber-related investigations. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020 that his agency opens a new investigation into a Chinese counterintelligence effort every 10 hours, and half of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigations are related to China. And the intelligence community’s threats assessments have long warned that China is “almost certainly capable” of launching disruptive and destructive cyberattacks.

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Summary: Two distinct networks in the frontal and temporal lobes become activated and work in unison to integrate the meaning of words in order to obtain a higher-order and more complex meaning when reading.

Source: UT Houston.

When a person reads a sentence, two distinct networks in the brain are activated, working together to integrate the meanings of the individual words to obtain more complex, higher-order meaning, according to a study at UTHealth Houston.

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