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Aug 19, 2020

Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’

Posted by in categories: energy, food, sustainability

Circa 2014


The waste fibres from hemp crops can be transformed into high-performance energy storage devices, scientists say.

They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” — the industry gold standard.

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Aug 19, 2020

AI automatic tuning delivers step forward in quantum computing

Posted by in categories: information science, quantum physics, robotics/AI

Researchers at Oxford University, in collaboration with DeepMind, University of Basel and Lancaster University, have created a machine learning algorithm that interfaces with a quantum device and ‘tunes’ it faster than human experts, without any human input. They are dubbing it “Minecraft explorer for quantum devices.”

Classical computers are composed of billions of transistors, which together can perform complex calculations. Small imperfections in these transistors arise during manufacturing, but do not usually affect the operation of the computer. However, in a quantum computer similar imperfections can strongly affect its behavior.

In prototype semiconductor quantum computers, the standard way to correct these imperfections is by adjusting input voltages to cancel them out. This process is known as tuning. However, identifying the right combination of voltage adjustments needs a lot of time even for a single quantum . This makes it virtually impossible for the billions of devices required to build a useful general-purpose quantum computer.

Aug 19, 2020

Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots

Posted by in categories: drones, robotics/AI, space

This approach to increasing capacity will be particularly important as robots shrink to the microscale and below—scales at which current stand-alone batteries are too big and inefficient.

“Robot designs are restricted by the need for batteries that often occupy 20% or more of the available space inside a robot, or account for a similar proportion of the robot’s weight,” said Nicholas Kotov, the Joseph B. and Florence V. Cejka Professor of Engineering, who led the research.

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Aug 19, 2020

Why creating life-saving drugs is a lousy bet

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business

In a bitter paradox, antibiotics fuelled the growth of the twentieth century’s most profitable pharmaceutical companies, and are one of society’s most desperately needed classes of drug. Yet the market for them is broken. For almost two decades, the large corporations that once dominated antibiotic discovery have been fleeing the business, saying that the prices they can charge for these life-saving medicines are too low to support the cost of developing them. Most of the companies now working on antibiotics are small biotechnology firms, many of them running on credit, and many are failing.


Paratek Pharmaceuticals successfully brought a new antibiotic to the market. So why is the company’s long-term survival in question?

Aug 19, 2020

Ancient Extinction Event Likely Triggered By Nearby Supernova, Says New Paper

Posted by in categories: cosmology, existential risks

Astrophysical detectives point to a cosmic supernova explosion or explosions to explain ancient extinction events here on Earth.

Aug 19, 2020

Asteroid makes closest fly-by of Earth on record — and NASA didn’t see it until after the close shave

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, existential risks

An asteroid the size of a car has flown past Earth closer than any seen before without hitting the planet — and NASA admits: “We didn’t see it coming.”

Known as asteroid 2020 QG, NASA said the space rock passed 1,830 miles (2,950 km) above the southern Indian Ocean on Sunday.

If it had actually been on an impact trajectory, it would likely have become a “fireball” as it broke up in the Earth’s atmosphere, the US space agency said.

Aug 19, 2020

Mathematicians Solve Part of the Weirdest Open Problem Ever

Posted by in category: mathematics

Two mathematicians say they’ve untangled the first part of Paul Erdos’s famously thorny and unproven conjecture. In a new paper they’ve uploaded to arXiv and submitted to journals, mathematicians Thomas Bloom and Olof Sisask say they’ve jumped the first hurdle in the Erdos conjecture. If this is true, the next generation of researchers could start from that point with the first part finished and in hand.

➗ You love numbers. So do we. Let’s nerd out over numbers together.

Aug 19, 2020

The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Just Gave Rise to a ‘Molecular Black Hole’

Posted by in category: cosmology

Circa 2017


Imagine you took all sunlight that hits our planet at any given moment, and focussed it on one (unfortunate) piece of Earth the size of a thumbnail. Now times that blistering intensity by 100, and you’re beginning to understand the insanity of the world’s most powerful X-ray laser.

In a surprise result, scientists have focussed the full intensity of this laser onto a single molecule, and the aftermath has given rise to a phenomenon no one’s ever seen before — a molecular ‘black hole’, which consumes anything in its path.

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Aug 19, 2020

Black hole collision may have exploded with light

Posted by in categories: cosmology, education, physics

:ooo

Astronomers have seen what appears to the first light ever detected from a black hole merger.


When two black holes spiral around each other and ultimately collide, they send out ripples in space and time called gravitational waves. Because black holes do not give off light, these events are not expected to shine with any light waves, or electromagnetic radiation. Graduate Center, CUNY astrophysicists K. E. Saavik Ford and Barry McKernan have posited ways in which a black hole merger might explode with light. Now, for the first time, astronomers have seen evidence of one of these light-producing scenarios. Their findings are available in the current issues of Physical Review Letters.

A team consisting of scientists from The Graduate Center, CUNY; Caltech’s Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF); Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC); and The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) spotted what appears to be a flare of light from a pair of coalescing black holes. The event (called S190521g) was first identified by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European Virgo detector on May 21, 2019. As the black holes merged, jiggling space and time, they sent out gravitational waves. Shortly thereafter, scientists at ZTF — which is located at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego — reviewed their recordings of the same the event and spotted what may be a flare of light coming from the coalescing black holes.

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Aug 19, 2020

Synthesis of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Images via Multi-channel Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

Posted by in category: computing

Circa 2017


Positron emission tomography (PET) image synthesis plays an important role, which can be used to boost the training data for computer aided diagnosis systems. However, existing image synthesis methods have problems in synthesizing the low resolution PET images. To address these limitations, we propose multi-channel generative adversarial networks (M-GAN) based PET image synthesis method. Different to the existing methods which rely on using low-level features, the proposed M-GAN is capable to represent the features in a high-level of semantic based on the adversarial learning concept. In addition, M-GAN enables to take the input from the annotation (label) to synthesize the high uptake regions e.g., tumors and from the computed tomography (CT) images to constrain the appearance consistency and output the synthetic PET images directly.