A doctor in India is planning to transplant a womb into a transgender woman, possibly enabling her to carry children, a report says.
New Delhi-based surgeon Dr Narendra Kaushik plans to perform the surgery at his clinic using a donated organ from a living or dead donor, according to The Mirror.
“Every transgender woman wants to be as female as possible,” Kaushik told the paper.
While Insight may soon go offline, Mars decided to give it at least one last show, jolting the craft with a 5.0 magnitude marsquake.
Latest updates on Starship design — and a lot of stuff that still needs to improve.
Today we’re going inside Starbase with the ultimate tour guide, Elon Musk. He’s going to take us through the High Bay to see where Starships are assembled, we’ll also see the new MegaBay under construction and talk about SpaceX’s plans to get this rocket flying.
Recommended videos to help with some context [Playlist] — https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWzKfs3icbT55w6f9wGqXkhk_SlanIhnr.
Water scarcity is a growing problem around the world. Desalination of seawater is an established method to produce drinkable water but comes with huge energy costs. For the first time, researchers use fluorine-based nanostructures to successfully filter salt from water. Compared to current desalination methods, these fluorous nanochannels work faster, require less pressure and less energy, and are a more effective filter.
If you’ve ever cooked with a nonstick Teflon-coated frying pan, then you’ve probably seen the way that wet ingredients slide around it easily. This happens because the key component of Teflon is fluorine, a lightweight element that is naturally water repelling, or hydrophobic. Teflon can also be used to line pipes to improve the flow of water. Such behavior caught the attention of Associate Professor Yoshimitsu Itoh from the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Tokyo and his team. It inspired them to explore how pipes or channels made from fluorine might operate on a very different scale, the nanoscale.
“We were curious to see how effective a fluorous nanochannel might be at selectively filtering different compounds, in particular, water and salt. And, after running some complex computer simulations, we decided it was worth the time and effort to create a working sample,” said Itoh. “There are two main ways to desalinate water currently: thermally, using heat to evaporate seawater so it condenses as pure water, or by reverse osmosis, which uses pressure to force water through a membrane that blocks salt. Both methods require a lot of energy, but our tests suggest fluorous nanochannels require little energy, and have other benefits too.”
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Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little black hole in your office? You know, maybe as a trash bin. Or to move around the furniture. Or just as a kind of nerdy gimmick. Why can we not make black holes? Or can we? If we could, what could we do with them? And what’s a black hole laser? That’s what we’ll talk about today.
The Press and Teukolsky paper about the black hole bomb is here:
https://www.nature.com/articles/238211a0
The paper about black hole lasers by Corey and Jacobson is here:
There have appeared many new scientific discoveries since that time, and many of them shake the foundations of the famous theory. It’s full of gaps and unanswered questions. So doesn’t this mean it’s not that perfect?
In this video, I’ll tell you: how many dimensions can the Universe have? What if the world was made of liquid? And most importantly, you’ll find out why the Big Bang theory can be wrong.
A researcher from Skoltech has filled in the gaps connecting quantum simulators with more traditional quantum computers, discovering a new computationally universal model of quantum computation, the variational model. The paper was published as a Letter in the journal Physical Review A. The work made the Editors’ Suggestion list.
A quantum simulator is built to share properties with a target quantum system we wish to understand. Early quantum simulators were ‘dedicated’—that means they could not be programmed, tuned or adjusted and so could mimic one or very few target systems. Modern quantum simulators enable some control over their settings, offering more possibilities.
In contrast to quantum simulators, the long-promised quantum computer is a fully programmable quantum system. While building a fully programmable quantum processor remains elusive, noisy quantum processors that can execute short quantum programs and offer limited programmability are now available in leading laboratories around the world. These quantum processors are closer to the more established quantum simulators.
A team of researchers and engineers at Canadian company Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc., working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S., has developed a programmable, scalable photonic quantum chip that can execute multiple algorithms. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they made their chip, its characteristics and how it can be used. Ulrik Andersen with the Technical University of Denmark has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining current research on quantum computers and the work by the team in Canada.
Scientists around the world are working to build a truly useful quantum computer that can perform calculations that would take traditional computers millions of years to carry out. To date, most such efforts have been focused on two main architectures—those based on superconducting electrical circuits and those based on trapped-ion technology. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both must operate in a supercooled environment, making them difficult to scale up. Receiving less attention is work using a photonics-based approach to building a quantum computer. Such an approach has been seen as less feasible because of the problems inherent in generating quantum states and also of transforming such states on demand. One big advantage photonics-based systems would have over the other two architectures is that they would not have to be chilled—they could work at room temperature.
In this new effort, the group at Xanadu has overcome some of the problems associated with photonics-based systems and created a working programmable photonic quantum chip that can execute multiple algorithms and can also be scaled up. They have named it the X8 photonic quantum processing unit. During operation, the chip is connected to what the team at Xanadu describe as a “squeezed light” source—infrared laser pulses working with microscopic resonators. This is because the new system performs continuous variable quantum computing rather than using single-photon generators.
Scientists have momentarily restored a faint twinkle of life to dying cells in the human eye.
In order to better understand the way nerve cells succumb to a lack of oxygen, a team of US researchers measured activity in mouse and human retinal cells soon after their death.
Amazingly, with a few tweaks to the tissue’s environment, they were able to revive the cells’ ability to communicate hours later.
