Testy ties with U.S. and Australia could be prodding China to boost food reserves.
DALIAN, China/TOKYO — Less than 20% of the world’s population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe’s maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine.
Created as an analogy for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) — which describes the interactions due to the electromagnetic force carried by photons — Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of physics that explains the interactions mediated by the strong force — one of the four fundamental forces of nature.
A new collection of papers published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics and edited by Diogo Boito, Instituto de Fisica de Sao Carlos, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Irinel Caprini, Horia Hulubei National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania, brings together recent developments in the investigation of QCD.
The editors explain in a special introduction to the collection that due to a much stronger coupling in the strong force — carried by gluons between quarks, forming the fundamental building blocks of matter — described by QCD, than the electromagnetic force, the divergence of perturbation expansions in the mathematical descriptions of a system can have important physical consequences. The editors point out that this has become increasingly relevant with recent high-precision calculations in QCD, due to advances in the so-called higher-order loop computations.
Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology show that strain on ventricular walls explains where lesions develop in the aging brain.
As our brains age, small lesions begin to pop up in the bundles of white matter that carry messages between our neurons. The lesions can damage this white matter and lead to cognitive deficits. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology and colleagues not only provide an explanation for the location of these lesions but also how they develop in the first place.
The work, led by Johannes Weickenmeier, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens, highlights the importance of viewing the brain as more than neural circuitry that underpins how thoughts are formed, and memories created. It’s also a physical object that’s prone to glitches and mechanical failures. “The brain is susceptible to wear and tear in vulnerable areas,” Weickenmeier said. “Especially in an aging brain, we need to look at its biomechanical properties to better understand how things can start to go wrong.”
The goal is to ‘bring cryptocurrency to the mainstream’ using the well-known consumer brand.
Micro-electromechanical systems or MEMS are tiny integrated devices that combine mechanical and electrical components. Traditional manufacturing techniques such as milling, turning, and molding become impractical at small scales so MEMS devices are fabricated using the same batch processing techniques used to fabricate integrated circuits. These devices can range in size from a few microns to several millimeters.
Because MEMS devices are a hybrid of mechanical and electronic mechanisms, they’re generally fabricated using a combination of traditional integrated circuit technologies and more sophisticated methods that manipulate both silicon and other substrates in a manner that exploit their mechanical properties.
In bulk micromachining, the substrate is removed in a manner similar to traditional integrated circuit techniques.
Surface micromachining, by comparison, is a predominantly additive in nature and is used to create more complex MEMS-based machinery. Material is deposited on the surface of the substrate in layers of thin films.
Scientists have discovered new cradle of life with several different species hidden underneath the ice shelf in Antarctica.
When you think of Antarctica, the first thing that comes to mind is most likely that it’s a frozen wasteland. Sure, there is some life in the Antarctic world. But for the most part, the land is mostly made up of a below-freezing environment. Now, though, scientists have uncovered new life underneath the ice shelf.
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According to a new study, scientists have discovered more marine life than previously expected under the Antarctic ice shelf. The study was published this past week in the journal Current Biology.
PARIS, Dec. 23, 2021 – LightOn announces the integration of one of its photonic co-processors in the Jean Zay supercomputer, one of the Top500 most powerful computers in the world. Under a pilot program with GENCI and IDRIS, the insertion of a cutting-edge analog photonic accelerator into High Performance Computers (HPC) represents a technological breakthrough and a world-premiere. The LightOn photonic co-processor will be available to selected users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months.
LightOn’s Optical Processing Unit (OPU) uses photonics to speed up randomized algorithms at a very large scale while working in tandem with standard silicon CPU and NVIDIA latest A100 GPU technology. The technology aims to reduce the overall computing time and power consumption in an area that is deemed “essential to the future of computational science and AI for Science” according to a 2021 U.S. Department of Energy report on “Randomized Algorithms for Scientific Computing.”
INRIA (France’s Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) researcher Dr. Antoine Liutkus provided additional context to the integration of LightOn’s coprocessor in the Jean Zay supercomputer: “Our research is focused today on the question of large-scale learning. Integrating an OPU in one of the most powerful nodes of Jean Zay will give us the keys to carry out this research, and will allow us to go beyond a simple ” proof of concept.”
AMD to offer five Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs for workstations.
Dual-processor workstations are the stomping grounds of companies like Dell, HP, and Lenovo. They tend to cost as much as a car and are aimed at the most performance-demanding professionals with very deep pockets. It is hard to expect motherboard makers to offer dual-socket sWRX8 platforms at this time since 128-core/256-thread machines are complete overkill even for the workstation segment (which is why this capability might be canned if AMD feels that it is easier to offer Epyc platforms for the same market segment instead). Meanwhile, the report also says that Asus and Gigabyte intend to release all-new single-socket motherboards for the upcoming Ryzen Threadripper Pro 5000WX CPUs.
AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper Pro retains eight memory channels to provide loads of bandwidth and support for plenty of memory for professional applications. The CPUs will continue to use the sWRX8 socket, though we do not know whether the new products will be drop-in compatible with the existing sWRX8 platform (probably they will, albeit with a BIOS update).
Since the Ryzen Threadripper Pro processors are designed for professional workstations, not gamers (so you shouldn’t expect to see them in our list of the best CPUs for gaming), it shouldn’t come as a surprise that all the CPUs have a similar rather conservative 4.55 GHz boost clock at a maximum TDP of 280W. The chips will also come with the B2 stepping.
Agility Robotics’ Cassie just became the first bipedal robot to complete an outdoor 5K run, completing the jaunt on a single charge.
Agility Robotics’ Cassie just became the first bipedal robot to complete an outdoor 5K run — and it did so untethered and on a single charge.
The challenge: To create robots that can seamlessly integrate into our world, it makes sense to design those robots to walk like we do. That should make it easier for them to navigate our homes and workplaces.
Korea Zinc buys wind and solar developer Epuron, delivering a wind and solar portfolio of up to 9GW for its green metals and hydrogen ambitions.
Korean Zinc, the world’s biggest zinc, lead and silver producer, has bought Australian-based renewable energy developer Epuron as part of its move towards 100 per cent renewables, green metals and green hydrogen.
The purchase is a significant move, and underlines the determination of some of the world’s biggest metals companies to switch to green products, in moves that will surely turbo-charge the development of wind and solar projects in Australia and across the globe.
