Lifeboat Foundation

Demonstrating that a material thought to be always chemically inert, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), can be turned chemically active holds potential for a new class of catalysts with a wide range of applications, according to an international team of researchers.

HBN is a layered material and monolayers can be exfoliated like in graphene 0, another two-dimensional material. However, there is a key difference between the two.

“While hBN shares similar structure as graphene, the strong polar bonds between the boron and nitride atoms makes hBN unlike graphene in that it is chemically inert and thermally stable at high temperature,” said Yu Lei, postdoctoral scholar in physics at Penn State and first co-author in the study published in Materials Today.

By Sieglinde Pfaendler, Omar Costa Hamido, Eduardo Reck Miranda

Science and the arts have increasingly inspired each other. In the 20th century, this has led to new innovations in music composition, new musical instruments, and changes to the way that the music industry does business to day. In turn, art has helped scientists think in new ways, and make advances of their own.

An emerging community leveraging quantum computing in music and the music industry has inspired us to organize the “1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity.” This symposium will bring together pioneering individuals from academia, industry, and music. They will present research, new works, share ideas, and learn new tools for incorporating quantum computation into music and the music industry. This symposium was made possible through the funding of the QuTune Project kindly provided by the United Kingdom National Quantum Technologies Programme’s Quantum Computing and Simulation Hub (QCS Hub).

Newsweek spoke to planetary scientist Dr. Amy Mainzer about the “Don’t Look Up” science and coaching Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence for the movie.

Astronomers have outlined their vision for what comes after the James Webb Space Telescope, and it’s a suite of tools to answer some of our biggest questions.

Any discussion on UBI eventually boils down to a question of belief in the nature of humans and the role of government. Most analysis further add wood to the fire by fueling these discussions instead of proposing valid alternatives which addresses these differences. It usually boils down to the classic question of handouts, who should pay for it, and why should we pay for it. Yet the answer lies right before our very eyes. The most valuable commodity today is data not oil or gold. Data wealth is a direct outcome of data diversity, data representation and data scale (i wrote a post on that recently which expands on that, if you’re interested). So, Instead of giving away our data for free to trickle-down techno believers (who may or may not give some of it back), pay me for it. I’ll fund my own income, thank you very much. Every human is unique. Therefore we are all data billionaires. This comment is a charitable contribution to the new data economy by the Marc O Principle; Things are not always as complex as they seem.

Technologists envisage an electronically interconnected future that will depend on cheap, lightweight, flexible devices. Efforts to optimize the semiconductor materials needed for these electronic devices are therefore necessary. Researchers from the University of Tsukuba have reported a record-breaking germanium (Ge) thin film on a plastic substrate that offers flexibility without compromising performance. Their findings are published in ACS Applied Electronic Materials.

Ge is a popular semiconductor for use in transistors because it has high charge carrier mobility (charge carrier refers to the electrons and electron holes that move through the material). Ge can also be processed at the relatively low temperature of ~500 degrees Celsius and has a low Young’s modulus, which means it is a softer alternative to commonly used materials such as silicon.

Ge thin films can be grown using the solid-phase crystallization technique. These thin films are polycrystalline, meaning they are made up of many Ge crystals. In general, larger crystals lead to greater carrier mobilities because bigger crystals form fewer grain boundaries that obstruct the current. Recent increases in grain size have therefore led to effective Ge thin-film transistors on rigid substrates such as glass.

Drug-target interaction is a prominent research area in drug discovery, which refers to the recognition of interactions between chemical compounds and the protein targets. Chemists estimate that 1,060 compounds with drug-like properties could be made—that’s more than the total number of atoms in the Solar System, as an article reported in the journal Nature in 2017.

Drug development, on average, takes about 14 years and costs up to 1.5 billion dollars. During the journey of drug discovery in this vast “galaxy,” it is apparent that traditional biological experiments for DTI detection are normally costly and time-consuming.

Prof. Hou Tingjun is an expert in computer-aided drug design (CADD) at the Zhejiang University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences. In the past decades, he has been committed to developing drugs using computer technology. “The biggest challenge lies in the interactions between unknown targets and drug molecules. How can we discover them more efficiently? This involves a new breakthrough in method.”

It’s really happening. After all the years of delays, reschedulings, budget shortfalls, and even more delays, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on December 25 and is now successfully on its way to is destination at the second LaGrange point (L2), about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from Earth.

If you celebrate Christmas and are astronomically inclined, the launch feels like a true Christmas miracle.

The footage of JWST’s separation from the Ariane 5 rocket, as seen from a camera on the rocket’s second stage is just absolutely stunning.

Dictionary for dogs.

“What a shock,” said no dog lover ever.