Lifeboat Foundation

The US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has selected the first-ever group of encryption tools that could potentially withstand the attack of a quantum computer.

The four selected encryption algorithms will now reportedly become part of NIST’s post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) standard, which should be finalized in about two years.

More specifically, for general encryption (used for access to secure websites), NIST has selected the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm.

Researchers, led by experts at Imperial College London, have developed a new method that allows gene expression to be precisely altered by supplying and removing electrons. Scientists engineer new tools to electronically control gene expression.

New microelectronics device can program and reprogram computer hardware on demand through electrical pulses.

Lithium Ion-based batteries are among the most effective and widely used battery technologies. However, the batteries’ electrolytes mainly contain organic carbonated solvents, which are considered highly flammable with a narrow temperature window. To ensure that they don’t catch fire while operating at extreme temperatures, engineers must design safer electrolytes that are not only non-flammable, but also able to operate at a wide temperature range.

Researchers in the University of California San Diego’s Shirley Meng group and at the Army Research Laboratory have recently developed new liquefied gas electrolytes that could be used to produce lithium-metal batteries that can operate safely from-60 to 55 ^o C. These electrolytes have a unique structure, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, which make them capable of extinguishing fire.

“The liquefied gas electrolyte (LGE) was firstly conceptualized by our research group in a paper published in Science in 2017 and has been developed over five years,” Yijie Yin, one of the researchers who are working in this field from Prof. Meng’s lab, told TechXplore. “It consists of a variety of fluorocarbon gases, that when put under pressure, liquefies to form a chemically stable, low-freezing point, low-cost electrolyte.”

A cutting-edge AI development that could boost smartphone battery life by 30 percent and shave countless kilowatts from energy bills will be unveiled to technology giants. The ground-breaking University of Essex-developed work has been rolled into an app called EOptomizer—which will be demonstrated to expert researchers and designers as well as major manufacturing companies like Nokia and Huawei.

It is hoped the EOptomizer app will be adapted across the industry and help drive down carbon emissions, by making consumers’ goods last longer.

It will do this by using software to dramatically increasing efficiency and reliability in phones, tablets, cars, smart fridges and computers’ batteries—delaying when consumers need to buy carbon-footprint-producing replacements. The event—which takes place in Robinson College, in Cambridge, on 11July—will showcase the impact EOptomizer could have across the globe.

Powerful radio pulses originating deep in the cosmos can be used to study hidden pools of gas cocooning nearby galaxies, according to a new study appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.

So-called fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are pulses of radio waves that typically originate millions to billions of light-years away (radio waves are electromagnetic radiation like the light we see with our eyes but have longer wavelengths and frequencies). The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds more have been found. In 2020, Caltech’s STARE2 instrument (Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2) and Canada’s CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) detected a massive FRB that went off in our own Milky Way galaxy. Those earlier results helped confirm the theory that the energetic events most likely originate from dead, magnetized stars called magnetars.

As more and more FRBs roll in, researchers are now asking how they can be used to study the gas that lies between us and the bursts. In particular, they would like to use the FRBs to probe halos of diffuse gas that surround galaxies. As the radio pulses travel toward Earth, the gas enveloping the galaxies is expected to slow the waves down and disperse the radio frequencies. In the new study, the researchers looked at a sample of 474 distant FRBs detected by CHIME, which has discovered the most FRBs to date, and showed that the subset of two dozen FRBs that passed through galactic halos were indeed slowed down more than non-intersecting FRBs.

Using NASA’s Fermi space telescope, Chinese astronomers have investigated a newly discovered millisecond pulsar known as PSR J1835−3259B. As a result, they identified gamma-ray pulsations from this source. The finding is reported in a paper published June 27 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Pulsars are highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars emitting a beam of electromagnetic radiation. The most rapidly rotating pulsars, with rotation periods below 30 milliseconds, are known as millisecond pulsars (MSPs). Astronomers assume that they are formed in binary systems when the initially more massive component turns into a neutron star that is then spun up due to accretion of matter from the secondary star.

PSR J1835−3259B is a recently discovered MSP in the globular cluster NGC 6652. It has a spin period of approximately 1.83 milliseconds and is in a nearly circular orbit of about 28.7 hours within the cluster. The distance to the pulsar is estimated to be some 32,600 light years.

Today marks 28 years since Amazon was founded in Bellevue, Washington. The company’s presence in the region now spans numerous facilities, including corporate o… See more.

Seattle is home to teams conducting research across the breadth of Amazon businesses, from locker and counter pickups at Amazon Hubs to last-mile routing and driver support to research for a wide variety of Amazon initiatives.

The two tetraquarks, T^a_cs0 (2900)⁺⁺ and T^a_cs0 (2900)⁰, are observed in joint analysis of the B⁰→ D⁰D_s⁺π^– and B⁺→D^– D_s⁺ π⁺ decays. The new tetraquarks are observed with masses around 2.9 GeV in both the D_s⁺π⁺ and D_s⁺π^– mass spectra. The former corresponds to the first observation of a doubly charged open-charm tetraquark with minimal quark content csud and the latter is a neutral tetraquark composed of csud quarks. The D_s⁺π⁺ and D_s⁺π^– mass spectra in the top images above indicate that the sum of contributions from conventional resonances (particles) cannot explain experimental distribution around the mass of 2.9 GeV. On the other hand, the experimental distributions are well understood when the contributions of the two new teraquarks are included in the analysis as shown in the two bottom images above. The mass and the width are determined to be 2.908±0.011±0.02 GeV and 0.136±0.023±0.011 GeV, respectively. The quantum numbers are determined to be J^P=0⁺. In the language of particle physics the two tetraquarks are isospin partners.

In the conventional quark model, strongly interacting particles known as hadrons are formed either from quark-antiquark pairs (mesons) or three quarks (baryons). Particles which cannot be classified within this scheme are referred to as exotic hadrons. In their fundamental 1964 papers [1] and [2], in which they proposed the quark model, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig mentioned the possibility of adding a quark-antiquark pair to a minimal meson or baryon quark configuration. It took 50 years, however, for physicists to obtain unambiguous experimental evidence of the existence of these exotic hadrons. In April 2014 the LHCb collaboration published measurements that demonstrated that the Z(4430)^– particle, first observed by the Belle collaboration, is composed of four quarks (ccdu).

It’s time to #UnfoldTheUniverse. Watch as the mission team reveals the long-awaited first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb, an international collaboration led by NASA with our partners the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is the biggest telescope ever launched into space. It will unlock mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it.

All about Webb: https://webb.nasa.gov/