Lifeboat Foundation

A long-held goal by chemists across many industries, including energy, pharmaceuticals, energetics, food additives and organic semiconductors, is to imagine the chemical structure of a new molecule and be able to predict how it will function for a desired application. In practice, this vision is difficult, often requiring extensive laboratory work to synthesize, isolate, purify and characterize newly designed molecules to obtain the desired information.

Recently, a team of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) materials and computer scientists have brought this vision to fruition for energetic molecules by creating machine learning (ML) models that can predict molecules’ crystalline properties from their chemical structures alone, such as molecular density. Predicting crystal structure descriptors (rather than the entire crystal structure) offers an efficient method to infer a material’s properties, thus expediting materials design and discovery. The research appears in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling.

“One of the team’s most prominent ML models is capable of predicting the crystalline density of energetic and energetic-like molecules with a high degree of accuracy compared to previous ML-based methods,” said Phan Nguyen, LLNL applied mathematician and co-first author of the paper.

This Stone Predates the Sun.

Recent analysis of a stone found in the Libyan Desert Glass area of southwest Egypt, has sparked debate and a rethink of the current consensus on the formation of the solar system.

In a study, due to be published next month, a team of international researchers announced the resulting analysis of a stone that was subsequently named Hypatia after the ancient female astronomer of Alexandria.

Continue reading “Egyptian stone predates the Sun” »

Circa 2020 o,.o!

Every robot is, at its heart, a computer that can move. That is true from the largest plane-sized flying machines down to the smallest of controllable nanomachines, small enough to someday even navigate through blood vessels.

New research, published August 26 in Nature, shows that it is possible to build legs into robots mere microns in length. When powered by lasers, these tiny machines can move, and some day, they may save lives in operating rooms or even, possibly, on the battlefield.

Continue reading “Nano Robots Walk Inside Blood When Hit With Lasers” »

Space mining. 😃

Is Space Mining Our Future Gold Mine? Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/undecided and enter promo code UNDECIDED for 83% off and 3 extra months for free! Rare-earth metals and other minerals are essential for green tech like EVs and renewable energy. Trouble is, we need a lot of them and their availability on Earth is limited. But what if we could tap into all the materials flying around in space? Some scientists claim we could mine asteroids in the future. Yes, asteroids. Is it just an Armageddon remake or will we eventually…dig into them…?

Continue reading “Does Space Mining Solve Our Resource Problem?” »

Researchers observed more than 500 of these mysterious cosmic explosions, unraveling the hidden nature of their sources.

The most popular theory suggests that FRBs come from neutron stars, the collapsed cores of massive stars. Scientists believe that the explosions could be a result of a specific type of neutron star known as a magnetar, named so for their powerful magnetic fields, thousands of trillions of times more powerful than Earth’s fields.

Continue reading “Scientists just took a big step toward mapping out the structure of the universe” »

“This can be hugely damaging in the event of ransomware attacks, where high privileges can enable the attackers to stop or destroy backups and other security tools,” Breen explained. “The ‘exploit detected’ tag means attackers are actively using them, so for me, it’s the most important piece of information we need to prioritize the patches.”

If you need any further incentive to update, these seven zero day exploits are part of 50 security vulnerabilities (including another five labelled ‘Critical’) which June’s Patch Tuesday will address. Google has also issued a similar warning for Chrome users.

If you are blocking Windows 10 system updates (a popular pastime for many users), now would be a very good time to stop doing so. Go to Start Settings Update & Security and in the Windows Update Window look to see if the update has already been downloaded. If not, click Check for Updates.

When particles are cooled down to temperatures just above absolute zero, they form a BEC – a state of matter in which all the particles occupy the same quantum state and thus act in unison, like a superfluid. A BEC made up of tens of thousands of particles therefore behaves as if it were just one single giant quantum particle.

An international team of researchers led by Carlos Anton-Solanas and Christian Schneider from the University of Oldenburg, Germany; Sven Höfling of the University of Würzburg, Germany; Sefaattin Tongay at Arizona State University, US; and Alexey Kavokin of Westlake University in China, has now generated a BEC from quasiparticles known as exciton-polaritons in atomically thin crystals. These quasiparticles form when excited electrons in solids couple strongly with photons.

“Devices that can control these novel light-matter states hold the promise of a technological leap in comparison with current electronic circuits,” explains Anton-Solanas, who is in the quantum materials group at Oldenburg’s Institute of Physics. “Such optoelectronic circuits, which operate using light instead of electric current, could be better and faster at processing information than today’s processors.”

But what struck me about his essay is that last clause: “if we as a society manage it responsibly.” Because, as Altman also admits, if he is right then A.I. will generate phenomenal wealth largely by destroying countless jobs — that’s a big part of how everything gets cheaper — and shifting huge amounts of wealth from labor to capital. And whether that world becomes a post-scarcity utopia or a feudal dystopia hinges on how wealth, power and dignity are then distributed — it hinges, in other words, on politics.

Will A.I. give us the lives of leisure we long for — or usher in a feudal dystopia? It depends.

Using an ultrafast transmission electron microscope, researchers from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology have, for the first time, recorded the propagation of combined sound and light waves in atomically thin materials.

The experiments were performed in the Robert and Ruth Magid Electron Beam Quantum Dynamics Laboratory headed by Professor Ido Kaminer, of the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Solid State Institute.

Continue reading “Nano Optics Breakthrough: Researchers Observe Sound-Light Pulses in 2D Materials for the First Time” »