Lifeboat Foundation

Another potential explanation is that the heartbeat is illuminated by more diffuse and unstructured outflows of gas and particles generated by the disk’s precession. These outflows are not as concentrated and luminous as the jets, but they could potentially ripple out to Fermi J1913+0515 and light it up in this unique way.

The team is in the midst of collecting follow-up observations with the IRAM 30m millimeter radio telescope in Spain that might constrain the origins of the strange gamma ray heartbeat.

“We discovered the source, and discovered its periodicity, but we do not know what it means or how it is produced, so we need more observations to continue the study,” Li said.

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.

Continue reading “Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’” »

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 device. This makes it virtually impossible for the billions of devices required to build a useful general-purpose quantum computer.

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.

Continue reading “Biomorphic batteries could provide 72x more energy for robots” »

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Continue reading “The World’s Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Just Gave Rise to a ‘Molecular Black Hole’” »