Menu

Blog

Page 6307

Jun 19, 2021

The 27.5-million-year cycle of geological activity

Posted by in category: existential risks

Geologic activity on Earth appears to follow a 27.5-million-year cycle, giving the planet a ‘pulse,’ according to a new study published in the journal Geoscience Frontiers.

“Many geologists believe that geological events are random over time. But our study provides statistical evidence for a common , suggesting that these geologic events are correlated and not random,” said Michael Rampino, a geologist and professor in New York University’s Department of Biology, as well as the study’s lead author.

Over the past five decades, researchers have proposed cycles of major geological events—including and mass extinctions on land and sea—ranging from roughly 26 to 36 million years. But early work on these correlations in the was hampered by limitations in the age-dating of geologic events, which prevented scientists from conducting quantitative investigations.

Jun 19, 2021

Windows 10 has only 4 years left to live (officially)

Posted by in category: computing

Microsoft will soon announce the next version of Windows on June 24. But before that happens, the company has already declared that it’s ending support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025.

As noted by Thurrott, this is the first time the firm has specified an end date for the entire operating system. Windows 10 was originally unveiled in 2015, so it will have had a good run of 10 years — suits its name too.

What does it mean for you when Microsoft will end support for Windows 10? Well, for starters, you’ll stop receiving software updates, and there will be no new features added to the operating system.

Jun 18, 2021

Photonic transistor and router using a single quantum-dot-confined spin in a single-sided optical microcavity

Posted by in categories: computing, internet, particle physics, quantum physics, security

Circa 2017


The future Internet is very likely the mixture of all-optical Internet with low power consumption and quantum Internet with absolute security. The optical regular Internet would be used by default, but switched over to quantum Internet when sensitive data need to be transmitted. PT and and its counterpart in the quantum limit SPT would be the core components for both OIP and QIP in future Internet. Compared with electronic transistors, PTs/SPTs potentially have higher speed, lower power consumption and compatibility with fibre-optic communication systems.

Several schemes for PT6,7,8,9,10 and SPT11,12,13,14,15,16,17 have been proposed or even proof-of-principle demonstrated. All these prototypes exploit optical nonlinearities, i.e., photon-photon interactions18. However, photons do not interact with each other intrinsically, so indirect photon-photon interactions via electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT)19, photon blockade20 and Rydberg blockade21 were intensively investigated in this context over last two decades in either natural atoms22,23 or artificial atoms including superconducting boxes24,25 and semiconductor quantum dots (QDs)12,13. PT can seldom work in the quantum limit as SPT with the gain greater than 1 because of two big challenges, i.e., the difficulty to achieve the optical nonlinearities at single-photon levels and the distortion of single-photon pulse shape and inevitable noise produced by these nonlinearities26. The QD-cavity QED system is a promising solid-state platform for information and communication technology (ICT) due to their inherent scalability and matured semiconductor technology. But the photon blockade resulting from the anharmonicity of Jaynes-Cummings energy ladder27 is hard to achieve due to the small ratio of the QD-cavity coupling strength to the system dissipation rates12,13,28,29,30,31,32 and the strong QD saturation33. Moreover, the gain of this type of SPT based on the photon blockade is quite limited and only 2.2 is expected for In(Ga)As QDs12,13.

Continue reading “Photonic transistor and router using a single quantum-dot-confined spin in a single-sided optical microcavity” »

Jun 18, 2021

Earth tipped over on its side 84 million years ago and then righted itself, new study finds

Posted by in category: futurism

If you’d been able to stare at Earth from space during the late Cretaceous, when Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops roamed, it would’ve looked like the whole planet had tipped over on its side.

According to a new study, Earth tilted by 12 degrees about 84 million years ago.

“A 12-degree tilt of the Earth could affect latitude that same amount,” Sarah Slotznick, a geobiologist at Dartmouth College and co-author of the new study, told Insider.

Jun 18, 2021

Researchers Manipulate Antimatter With Laser for the First Time

Posted by in categories: futurism, particle physics

For the first time, scientists from the ALPHA collaboration at CERN reported successfully manipulating antimatter with the use of a laser system — potentially changing antimatter research and guide future experiments on the field.

Antimatter basically refers to the opposite of matter. Specifically, antimatter has sub-atomic particles whose properties (such as electric charge) are the opposite of normal matter. Most of the challenges surrounding the detection and observation of antimatter come from the fact that it immediately “annihilates” when it comes into contact with normal matter.

Continue reading “Researchers Manipulate Antimatter With Laser for the First Time” »

Jun 18, 2021

Solar storms are back, threatening life as we know it on Earth

Posted by in categories: energy, satellites

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time—few people probably even knew it happened—but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple , jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

Jun 18, 2021

How scientists are embracing NFTs

Posted by in category: cryptocurrencies

The arguments over NFTs in science are similarly heated, with some saying they provide an incentive to showcase science to the public; a new method of fundraising; and even a way for people to earn royalties when pharmaceutical companies buy access to their genomic data. Others say that NFTs — which operate in a similar way to digital cryptocurrencies — are just needless energy pouring into a market bubble that’s sure to burst.


Is a trend of auctioning non-fungible tokens based on scientific data a fascinating art fad, an environmental disaster or the future of monetized genomics?

Jun 18, 2021

A New Technique for Seeing Exoplanet Surfaces Based on the Content of their Atmospheres

Posted by in category: space

A new study takes a look at how the presence of a surface can affect an exoplanets atmosphere, giving astrobiologists a way to study exoplanet surfaces without having to “see” them directly.

Jun 18, 2021

How to Detect Heat from Extraterrestrial Probes in Our Solar System

Posted by in category: space

We could do it with the James Webb Space Telescope—but we’d also need to return to the unfiltered curiosity we had as teenagers.

Jun 18, 2021

A new understanding of young stars can help us hunt for life in space

Posted by in category: alien life

How do stellar outbursts affect the planets that orbit them?


Scientists surveyed thousands of stars to understand the impact they have on their orbiting planets’ habitability.

Continue reading “A new understanding of young stars can help us hunt for life in space” »