Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) has discovered three new composite particles from observations made through the Large Hadron Collider – the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located in Switzerland and France. The discovery included a pair of tetraquarks and a pentaquark – thereby showcasing an even wider range of ways in which fundamental particles of the universe can interact with each other.

A quark is a fundamental particle, which means that it has no further known subdivisions in particle physics, as of now. Quarks, along with electrons, form the building blocks of all matter in the universe. A combination of multiple quarks is known as a hadron, which include two type – the positively charged proton and the neutral neutron.

While quarks have commonly been observed to come in combinations of twos and threes, the newly discovered hadrons are being referred to as “exotic” by the scientists because they feature four and five quarks in them. These particles are called ‘composite particles’, since they are composed of smaller fundamental building blocks – the quarks themselves.

Understanding what’s inside of a planet is like trying to figure out what’s inside of a gift without unwrapping it. But because we can’t simply tear open a planet, instead, we must rely on secondary evidence, like the waves generated by geologic events.

Seismology — the study of quakes and seismic waves — lets us take “images” of the interiors of planets. NASA’s Viking landers brought the first seismometers to Mars in 1976, but they were plagued by noise, which rendered them largely ineffective. It took more than 40 years until Mars hosted another mission equipped with a quake-measuring instrument: NASA’s InSight lander.

And although InSight is expected to retire later this year, ever since the lander touched down in 2018, this stationary surveyor has been studying marsquakes, slowly unveiling the interior of the Red Planet.

A lot of heat gets lost during the conversion of energy. Estimates even put it at more than 70%. However, in thermoelectric materials, such as those being studied at the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien, heat can be converted directly into electrical energy. This effect (the Seebeck effect) can be used in numerous applications in industry but also in everyday life.

Recently, Ernst Bauer’s research team made an exciting discovery in a thermoelectric material consisting of iron, vanadium and aluminum (Fe₂VAl). The researchers recently published their results in Nature Communications.

China is emerging as a pioneer in artificial intelligence as it makes strides in filing AI patents and experimenting with the latest AI technology to power industrial applications, industry experts said.

Their comments came after a Stanford University report that shows China filed more than half of all the world’s AI patent applications last year and Chinese researchers produced about one-third of AI journal papers and AI citations in 2021.

Wu Hequan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said China has been working to build a solid foundation to support its AI economy and is making significant contributions to AI globally.

Interpreting magnetic resonance images in the context of network control theory, researchers seek to explain the brain’s dynamics in terms of its structure, information content, and energetics.

Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile — Vulnerabilities — Information Security Newspaper | Hacking News.

In many cases, security vulnerabilities appear that affect the programs that we use on a day-to-day basis. A clear example is the browser. It may have vulnerabilities and that can allow a hacker to break in and steal passwords or personal information. That is what is happening now with Google Chrome and you should update it as soon as possible to fix a zero-day bug.

Google has released security updates to address a Zero-Day in its Chrome web browser that it said is being exploited in the wild.

Continue reading “Zero-Day vulnerability in Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi browsers allow taking control of your laptop or mobile” »

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.”