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A European team of astronomers led by Professor Kalliopi Dasyra of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, under participation of Dr. Thomas Bisbas, University of Cologne modeled several emission lines in Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) and Very Large Telescope (VLT) observations to measure the gas pressure in both jet-impacted clouds and ambient clouds. With these unprecedented measurements, published recently in Nature Astronomy, they discovered that the jets significantly change the internal and external pressure of molecular clouds in their path.

Depending on which of the two pressures changes the most, both compression of clouds and triggering of star formation and dissipation of clouds and delaying of star formation are possible in the same galaxy. “Our results show that supermassive black holes, even though they are located at the centers of galaxies, could affect star formation in a galaxy-wide manner,” said Professor Dasyra. “Studying the impact of pressure changes in the stability of clouds was key to the success of this project. Once few stars actually form in a wind, it is usually very hard to detect their signal on top of the signal of all other stars in the galaxy hosting the wind.”

It is believed that supermassive black holes lie at the centers of most galaxies in our universe. When particles that were infalling onto these black holes are trapped by magnetic fields, they can be ejected outwards and travel far inside galaxies in the form of enormous and powerful jets of plasma. These jets are often perpendicular to galactic disks. In IC 5,063 however, a galaxy 156 million light years away, the jets are actually propagating within the disk, interacting with cold and dense molecular gas clouds. From this interaction, compression of jet-impacted clouds is theorized to be possible, leading to gravitational instabilities and eventually star formation due to the gas condensation.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology and the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan) have recently probed a Chern mosaic topology and Berry-curvature magnetism in magic-angle graphene. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, offers new insight about topological disorder that can occur in condensed matter physical systems.

“Magic angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) has drawn a huge amount of interest over the past few years due to its experimentally accessible flat bands, creating a playground of highly correlated physics,” Matan Bocarsly, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org, “One such correlated phase observed in transport measurements is the quantum anomalous Hall effect, where topological edge currents are present even in the absence of an applied magnetic field.”

The quantum anomalous Hall effect is a charge transport-related phenomenon, in which a material’s Hall resistance is quantized to the so-called von Klitzing constant. It resembles the so-called integer quantum Hall effect, which Bocarsly and his colleagued had studied extensively in their previous works, particularly in graphene and MATBG.

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed the world’s first electric nanomotors made of DNA. The self-assembling structures can be activated by an electric charge to spin a ratcheting rotor arm.

The tiny motor was made using a technique called DNA origami. Like its namesake papercraft, the method involves intricately folding strands of DNA into three-dimensional shapes, with past examples including virus traps, immune-evading drug delivery systems, and even microscopic Van Gogh replicas. These structures are made by carefully selecting DNA sequences that will fold and attach to each other in certain ways, so researchers can add specific strands to a solution and let the DNA objects assemble themselves.

For the new study, the team used this process to make a molecular motor out of DNA for the first time. The motor consists of a rotor arm measuring up to 500 nanometers (nm) long, which is mounted on a base about 40 nm high that’s fixed to a glass plate. Wrapped around the tip of the base, just below the rotor, is a platform with several ratcheting obstacles built into its surface, which controls the direction that the rotor can spin.

The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China is likely one of the leading forces in AI development as far as investment is concerned. An October 2021 report published by the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University estimated that the PLA was spending between $1.6bn and $2.7bn on AI research and procurement per year, which is approximately equivalent to that of the US military.

The report, titled Harnessed Lightning, identified seven areas of interest for the PLA and its AI development that are detailed here in order of the quantity of contracts awarded as found by CSET:

Continue reading “The role of AI in the People’s Liberation Army” »

shoppingmode Microsoft has officially resumed blocking Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default across Office apps, weeks after temporarily announcing plans to roll back the change.

“Based on our review of customer feedback, we’ve made updates to both our end user and our IT admin documentation to make clearer what options you have for different scenarios,” the company said in an update on July 20.

Earlier this February, Microsoft publicized its plans to disable macros by default in Office applications such as Access, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Word as a way to prevent threat actors from abusing the feature to deliver malware.

Google has now decided to reverse a recent change that removed the Android “App Permissions” list from the Google Play Store.

Spyware sold by Israeli company Candiru has been caught exploiting a recently discovered zero-day vulnerability in Google Chrome (CVE-2022–2294).

Spyware sold by Israeli company Candiru has been caught exploiting a recently discovered zero-day vulnerability in Google Chrome (CVE-2022–2294).

Researchers uncover “Lightning Framework,” a new Swiss Army Knife-like Linux malware that has modular plugins and the ability to install rootkits.

At ICML, Amazon scientists presented a paper proposing a new way to estimate the effects of continuously varied treatment —one that uses an end-to-end machine le… See more.

Combining a cutting-edge causal-inference technique and end-to-end machine learning reduces root-mean-square error by 27% to 38%.