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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory have developed a new computational model that has opened up the potential to make one of their most powerful research tools even more so.

A particularly important tool in a chemist’s arsenal is Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. An NMR spectrometer measures the response of atomic nuclei to excitation with radiofrequency waves. This can provide researchers with atomic-level information about the physical, chemical, and electronic properties of materials, including those that are non-crystalline. Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) NMR is an “ultra” version of NMR, which excites unpaired electrons in radicals and transfers their high spin polarization to the nuclei in the sample being analyzed, resulting in faster, more detailed data. Ames Laboratory has developed DNP-NMR to probe very weak but important chemical signatures, and reduce experimental times from days to minutes.

Computational methods play an important role in experts’ understanding of DNP-NMR, especially for improving the design and execution of experiments using it. Until now, however, the work been limited in scope, and improvements in DNP-NMR techniques have tended to rely on some degree of “serendipity,” according to Fred Perras, an Associate Scientist at Ames Laboratory and a 2020 recipient of a DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Award.

At 250 times the resolution of most smartphone cameras, this camera will reveal facets of the cosmos as scientists have never seen them before.

Hualong One development is being closely watched in the battle for the nation’s next-generation nuclear power systems. Its success could mean a nuclear revival in China that would have little to do with western developers including Westinghouse Electric Co. from the U.S. and France’s Electricite de France SA.

China’s homegrown nuclear technology took a significant step forward as a Hualong One reactor began loading fuel for the first time.

China National Nuclear Power Co., a unit of China National Nuclear Corp., said fuel loading started at the Fuqing No. 5 reactor, the first to use the domestic technology, on Sept. 4 after securing an operating license from the nation’s Ministry of Ecology & Environment, according a statement on its WeChat account. No timeline was given for starting up the reactor.

Continue reading “China’s First Homegrown Nuclear Reactor Begins Loading Fuel” »

Natalia Herrera-Valencia and colleagues have successfully unscrambled entangled light after it has passed through a 2 m long multimode fibre. Led by Mehul Malik, the team at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tackled the challenge using entanglement itself. The research was done in collaboration with a colleague at the University of Glasgow and is described in a recent paper in Nature Physics.

Light passing through a disordered (or “complex”) medium like atmospheric fog or a multimode fibre gets scattered, albeit in a known manner. As a result, the information carried by the light gets distorted but is preserved, and extra steps are needed to access it. This gets especially tricky for the transport of entangled states of light because the medium muddles up the quantum correlations. The states get “scrambled” and “unscrambling” becomes necessary to retrieve the original entangled states.

This video explains the qualitative test of proteins.

The promise of artificial intelligence for cybersecurity is that it will free security professionals at government agencies from menial tasks and allow them to focus on threat hunting and higher-level work. Another benefit that might get lost in the shuffle, but is no less important, is that automation in cybersecurity can actually lead to enhanced security for agencies.

Five governments are testing that proposition. Last month, the states of Arizona, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Texas, along with Maricopa County, Ariz., announced a partnership with the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to pilot a cybersecurity automation program.

The agencies will be using security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools, which “enable organizations to collect security-threat data through multiple sources and perform triage response actions significantly faster than with manual processes,” according to a Johns Hopkins press release. The hope is that it will enable the agencies to “quickly and broadly share information — in near real time — and leverage automation to prevent or respond to cyberattacks,” the release states.

First photonic quantum computer on the cloud.

Astronauts lose bone and muscle mass on long-duration missions, but a new treatment administered to mice in space could prevent that from happening, a new study finds.

Even quantum computers make mistakes. Their computing ability is extraordinary, exceeding that of classical computers by far. This is because circuits in quantum computers are based on qubits that can represent not only zeroes or ones, but also superpositions of both states by using the principles of quantum mechanics. Despite their great potential, qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors due to the interactions with the external environment.

To solve this crucial issue, an international research group developed and implemented a new protocol that protects fragile quantum information and corrects errors due to qubit loss. This research group published the results of their study in Nature.

“Developing a fully functioning quantum processor still represents a great challenge for scientists across the world,” explains Davide Vodola who is one of the authors of the study as well as a researcher at the University of Bologna. “This research allowed us, for the first time, to implement a protocol that can detect and, at the same time, correct errors due to qubit loss. This ability could prove to be essential for the future development of large-scale quantum computers.”