Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 5578

Advanced nuclear and synchrotron imaging has confirmed that a 93-million-year-old crocodile found in Central Queensland devoured a juvenile dinosaur based on remains found in the fossilized stomach contents.

The discovery of the fossils in 2010 was made by the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum (QLD) in association with the University of New England, who are publishing their research in the journal Godwana Research.

The research was carried out by a large team led by Dr Matt White of the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and the University of New England.

Read more | >

Using a new fabrication technique, NIMS has developed a diamond field-effect transistor (FET) with high hole mobility, which allows reduced conduction loss and higher operational speed. This new FET also exhibits normally off behavior (i.e., electric current flow through the transistor ceases when no gate voltage is applied, a feature that makes electronic devices safer). These results may facilitate the development of low-loss power conversion and high-speed communications devices.

Diamond has excellent wide bandgap semiconductor properties: its bandgap is larger than those of and gallium nitride, which are already in practical use. Diamond therefore could potentially be used to create power electronics and communications devices capable of operating more energy efficiently at higher speeds, voltages and temperatures. A number of R&D projects have previously been carried out with the aim of creating FETs using hydrogen-terminated diamonds (i.e., diamonds with their superficial carbon atoms covalently bonded with hydrogen atoms). However, these efforts have failed to fully exploit diamonds’ excellent wide bandgap semiconductor properties: the (a measure of how quickly holes can move) of these diamond-integrated transistors was only 1–10% that of the diamonds before integration.

The NIMS research team succeeded in developing a high-performance FET by using hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) as a gate insulator instead of conventionally used oxides (e.g., alumina), and by employing a new fabrication technique capable of preventing the surface of hydrogen-terminated diamond from being exposed to air. At high hole densities, the hole mobility of this FET was five times that of conventional FETs with oxide gate insulators. FETs with high hole mobility can operate with lower electrical resistance, thereby reducing conduction loss, and can be used to develop higher speed and smaller electronic devices. The team also demonstrated normally-off operation of the FET, an important feature for power electronics applications. The new fabrication technique enabled removal of electron acceptors from the surface of the hydrogen-terminated diamond.

Read more | >

Humans have been trying to understand how the brain works and how it acquires information for centuries. While neuroscientists now have a pretty good understanding of how different parts of the brain work and what their function is, many questions remain unanswered; thus, a unified neuroscience theory is still lacking.

In recent years, computer scientists have been trying to create computational tools that artificially recreate the functions and processes of the human . New theories clarifying how the brain makes predictions could help to significantly enhance these tools so that they replicate neural functions in increasingly realistic ways.

Researchers at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience in Lethbridge, Canada have recently carried out a study investigating how individual learn and make predictions about the future. Their findings, published in Nature Machine Intelligence, suggest that the ability of single neurons to predict their future activity could offer a new learning mechanism.

Read more | >

The geopolitical tension surrounding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is intensifying. In retaliation to Russia’s attack on the sovereign nation, Western nations have either imposed or are contemplating sanctions against the country.

Although cryptocurrencies have sunk deep into the red in reaction to the Ukrainian crisis, analysts see the space as a potential beneficiary.

What Happened: The sanctions may not produce the intended effect in Russia, where cryptocurrency ownership is relatively higher, according to Bloomberg. The country is also taking steps to legalize cryptos.

Read more | >

Whether you live in an apartment downtown or in a detached house in the suburbs, if your mailbox is not built into your home you’ll have to go outside to see if anything’s there. But how do you prevent that dreadful feeling of disappointment when you find your mailbox empty? Well, we’re living in 2022, so today your mailbox is just another Thing to connect to the Internet of Things. And that’s exactly what [fhuable] did when he made a solar powered IoT mailbox.

The basic idea was to equip a mailbox with a camera and have it send over pictures of its contents. An ESP32-Cam module could do just that: with a 1,600 × 1,200 camera sensor, a 160 MHz CPU and an integrated WiFi adapter, [fhuable] just needed to write an Arduino sketch to have it take a picture every few hours and upload it to an FTP server.

But since running a long cable all the way from the house was not an attractive option, the whole module had to be completely wireless. [fhuable] decided to power it using a single 18,650 lithium ion cell, which gets topped up continuously thanks to a 1.5 W solar panel mounted on the roof of the mailbox. The other parts are housed in a 3D-printed enclosure that’s completely sealed to keep out moisture.

Read more | >

Summary: A newly developed technique allows researchers to remotely active neurons with the aid of microscopic magnetic particles.

Source: UCL

Scientists at UCL have developed a new technique that uses microscopic magnetic particles to remotely activate brain cells; researchers say the discovery in rats could potentially lead to the development of a new class of non-invasive therapies for neurological disorders.

Read more | >