Amazon.com Inc. is shutting down tests of its home delivery robot, the latest sign that the e-commerce giant is starting to wind down experimental projects amid slowing sales growth.
After a 10-year research study that started by accident and was met with skepticism, a team of Northeastern University mechanical engineers was able to synthesize highly dense, ultra-narrow silicon nanowires that could revolutionize the semiconductor industry. Their research appears in Nature Communications.
Yung Joon Jung, Northeastern professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, says it might have been his favorite research project.
“Everything is new, and it required a lot of perseverance,” says Jung, who specializes in engineering and application of nanostructure systems and previously studied carbon nanotubes.
Antibiotics are standard treatments for fighting dangerous bacterial infections. Yet the number of bacteria developing a resistance to antibiotics is increasing. Researchers from Texas A&M University and the University of São Paulo are overcoming this resistance with light.
The researchers tailored antimicrobial photodynamic therapy (aPDT)—a chemical reaction triggered by visible light—for use on antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains. Results showed the treatment weakened bacteria to where low doses of current antibiotics could effectively eliminate them.
“Using aPDT in combination with antibiotics creates a synergy of interaction working together for a solution,” said Vladislav Yakovlev, University Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M and co-director of the project. “It’s a step in the right direction against resistant bacteria.”
Optics, the study of light, is one of the oldest fields in physics and has never ceased to surprise researchers. Although the classical description of light as a wave phenomenon is rarely questioned, the physical origins of some optical effects are. A team of researchers at Tampere University have brought the discussion on one fundamental wave effect, the debate around the anomalous behavior of focused light waves, to the quantum domain.
The researchers have been able to show that quantum waves behave significantly differently from their classical counterparts and can be used to increase the precision of distance measurements. Their findings also add to the discussion on physical origin of the anomalous focusing behavior. The results are now published in Nature Photonics.
“Interestingly, we started with an idea based on our earlier results and set out to structure quantum light for enhanced measurement precision. However, we then realized that the underlying physics of this application also contributes to the long debate about the origins of the Gouy phase anomaly of focused light fields,” explains Robert Fickler, group leader of the Experimental Quantum Optics group at Tampere University.
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics honors research on the foundations of quantum mechanics, which opened up the quantum information frontier.
7 October 2022: We have replaced our initial one-paragraph announcement with a full-length Focus story.
The Nobel Prize in Physics this year recognizes efforts to take quantum weirdness out of philosophy discussions and to place it on experimental display for all to see. The award is shared by Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger, all of whom showed a mastery of entanglement—a quantum relationship between two particles that can exist over long distances. Using entangled photons, Clauser and Aspect performed some of the first “Bell tests,” which confirmed quantum mechanics predictions while putting to bed certain alternative theories based on classical physics. Zeilinger used some of those Bell-test techniques to demonstrate entanglement control methods that can be applied to quantum computing, quantum cryptography, and other quantum information technologies.
Meta security team has identified more than 400 malicious Android and iOS apps that have stolen users’ Facebook login credentials.
As part of another BYOVD attack, BlackByte ransomware exploits a flaw in a legitimate Windows driver to bypass security software.
This might be gettin out of hand.
Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelensky has said that he believed Moscow was laying the groundwork for a possible nuclear attack.
“They begin to prepare their society. That’s very dangerous,” he told the BBC.
“They are not ready to do it, to use it. But they begin to communicate. They don’t know whether they’ll use or not use it. I think it’s dangerous to even speak about it.”
An undergraduate and his supervisor ran the numbers and found paradox-free time travel to be mathematically consistent.
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