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Pulsar Shoots 7-light-year-long Phaser Blast

Nature proves truth is still stranger than fiction: A pulsar has shot energetic particles in a thin, straight line that extends for light-years into space. The discovery might explain how antimatter makes its way to Earth.

Star Trek can keep its ray guns — pulsars make far more powerful beams of radiation.

Crushed stellar cores, left behind when a massive star goes supernova, are among nature’s own particle accelerators. Though pulsars are only the size of Manhattan, their dizzying spins and powerful magnetic fields can energize particles to a significant fraction of the speed of light. In addition, pulsars glow with high-energy radiation, which can itself convert into pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons.

First ship-to-containership LNG bunkering operation in Asia

Singapore has performed the first liquefied natural gas bunkering operation from ship to containership in Asia. It is also the first time that bunkering took place simultaneously with cargo operations. This is a step forward for the decarbonisation of Singapore’s port.

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Human brain organoids grown in cheap 3D-printed bioreactor

Circa 2021

It is now possible to grow and culture human brain tissue in a device that costs little more than a cup of coffee. With a $5 washable and reusable microchip, scientists can watch self-organising brain samples, known as brain organoids, growing in real time under a microscope.

The device, dubbed a “microfluidic bioreactor”, is a 4-by-6-centimetre chip that includes small wells in which the brain organoids grow. Each is filled with nutrient-rich fluid that is pumped in and out automatically, like the fluids that flush through the human brain.

Using this system, Ikram Khan at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai and his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have now reported the growth of a brain organoid over seven days. This demonstrates that the brain cells can thrive inside the chip, says Khan.

Scientists See What People Picture in Their Mind’s Eye

Summary: Using electrocorticogram technology to capture brain waves, researchers found the meaning of what people imagine can be determined from brain wave patterns, even if the image differs from what a person is looking at.

Source: Osaka University.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Now, researchers from Japan have found that even a mental picture can communicate volumes.

Robotic telekinesis: Allowing humans to remotely operate and train robotic hands

Over the past few decades, computer scientists have developed increasingly advanced techniques to train and operate robots. Collectively, these methods could facilitate the integration of robotic systems in an increasingly wide range of real-world settings.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have recently created a new system that allows users to control a and arm remotely, simply by demonstrating the movements they want it to replicate in front of a camera. This system, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could open exciting possibilities for the teleoperation and remote training of robots completing missions in both everyday settings and environments that are inaccessible to humans.

“Prior works in this area rely either on gloves, motion markers or a calibrated multi-camera setup,” Deepak Pathak, one of the researchers who developed the new system, told TechXplore. “Instead, our system works using a single uncalibrated camera. Since no is needed, the user can be standing anywhere and still successfully teleoperate the robot.”

Toward a quantum computer that calculates molecular energy

Quantum computers are getting bigger, but there are still few practical ways to take advantage of their extra computing power. To get over this hurdle, researchers are designing algorithms to ease the transition from classical to quantum computers. In a new study in Nature, researchers unveil an algorithm that reduces the statistical errors, or noise, produced by quantum bits, or qubits, in crunching chemistry equations.

Developed by Columbia chemistry professor David Reichman and postdoc Joonho Lee with researchers at Google Quantum AI, the uses up to 16 qubits on Sycamore, Google’s 53- , to calculate ground state energy, the lowest energy state of a molecule. “These are the largest quantum chemistry calculations that have ever been done on a real quantum device,” Reichman said.

The ability to accurately calculate ground state energy, will enable chemists to develop new materials, said Lee, who is also a visiting researcher at Google Quantum AI. The algorithm could be used to design materials to speed up for farming and hydrolysis for making , among other sustainability goals, he said.