Menu

Blog

Page 7395

Jul 23, 2020

Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN

Posted by in categories: materials, particle physics

Physics Girl is on Patreon! ►► https://www.patreon.com/physicsgirl

There’s a factory in Europe that makes antimatter! It’s the rarest, most expensive, and potentially the most dangerous material on earth. Scientists don’t know why this material is so rare. Anti-atoms took 72 years after we discovered antimatter to make. Why?

Continue reading “Why This Stuff Costs $2700 Trillion Per Gram — Antimatter at CERN” »

Jul 23, 2020

Charging hundreds of EVs parked at a condo is a solvable problem, here’s how

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

Skeptics like to point out that most EV drivers live in single-family homes that make charging easy. And they point to the current lack of charging stations at condos as an impenetrable obstacle to EV adoption. But this viewpoint reflects a lack of understanding of how daily EV charging works. I recently chatted with Jason Appelbaum, chief executive of EverCharge — the biggest EV charging network you never heard of.


Several hundred electric cars, all parked in the same condo garage, can easily get their daily dose of electricity. It requires a smart load-balancing system.

Jul 23, 2020

Creating Water From Thin Air

Posted by in categories: business, sustainability

About 2.1 billion people around the world do not have immediate access to clean drinking water.

The Water Abundance XPrize competition rewards innovators who come up with new ways to harvest clean water from the atmosphere.

This year, the winning design can produce at least 2,000 litres of water per day, which would satisfy the needs of 100 people.… See More.

Continue reading “Creating Water From Thin Air” »

Jul 23, 2020

Elon Musk’s SpaceX in Talks to Raise Funds at $44 Billion Valuation

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

Billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is in talks to raise new capital at a valuation of about $44 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Jul 23, 2020

Two distinct circuits drive inhibition in the sensory thalamus of the brain, study finds

Posted by in categories: genetics, neuroscience

The thalamus is a “Grand Central Station” for sensory information coming to our brains. Almost every sight, sound, taste and touch we perceive travels to our brain’s cortex via the thalamus. It is theorized that the thalamus plays a major role in consciousness itself. Not only does sensory information pass through the thalamus, it is also processed and transformed by the thalamus so our cortex can better understand and interpret these signals from the world around us.

One powerful type of transformation comes from interactions between excitatory neurons that carry data to the neocortex and inhibitory neurons of the thalamic reticular nucleus, or TRN, that regulate flow of that data. Although the TRN has long been recognized as important, much less has been known about what kinds of cells are in the TRN, how they are organized and how they function.

Now a paper published in the journal Nature addresses those questions. Researchers led by corresponding author Scott Cruikshank, Ph.D., and co-authors Rosa I. Martinez-Garcia, Ph.D., Bettina Voelcker, Ph.D., and Barry Connors, Ph.D., show that the somatosensory part of the TRN is divided into two functionally distinct sub-circuits. Each has its own types of genetically defined neurons that are topographically segregated, are physiologically distinct and connect reciprocally with independent thalamocortical nuclei via dynamically divergent synapses.

Jul 23, 2020

Join us

Posted by in category: futurism

Tech-Inspired 2.0 is loading…
Don’t miss this opportunity if you are an in the 21’st Century.

Date: 25th Saturday July
Venue: Aladja Community Town Hall
Time: 12noon

Jul 23, 2020

Physicists develop technology to transform information from microwaves to optical light

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics, space

Physicists at the University of Alberta have developed technology that can translate data from microwaves to optical light—an advance that has promising applications in the next generation of super-fast quantum computers and secure fiber-optic telecommunications.

“Many quantum computer technologies work in the microwave regime, while many quantum communications channels, such as fiber and satellite, work with optical ,” explained Lindsay LeBlanc, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gasses for Quantum Simulation. “We hope that this platform can be used in the future to transduce quantum signals between these two regimes.”

The new technology works by introducing a between microwave radiation and atomic gas. The microwaves are then modulated with an , encoding information into the microwave. This modulation is passed through the gas atoms, which are then probed with to encode the signal into the light.

Jul 23, 2020

Intelligence community rolls out guidelines for ethical use of artificial intelligence

Posted by in categories: ethics, robotics/AI, security

The U.S. intelligence community (IC) on Thursday rolled out an “ethics guide” and framework for how intelligence agencies can responsibly develop and use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Among the key ethical requirements were shoring up security, respecting human dignity through complying with existing civil rights and privacy laws, rooting out bias to ensure AI use is “objective and equitable,” and ensuring human judgement is incorporated into AI development and use.

The IC wrote in the framework, which digs into the details of the ethics guide, that it was intended to ensure that use of AI technologies matches “the Intelligence Community’s unique mission purposes, authorities, and responsibilities for collecting and using data and AI outputs.”

Jul 23, 2020

Tech-Inspired 2.0 is loading…

Posted by in category: futurism

Join us


Don’t miss this opportunity if you are an in the 21’st Century.

Date: 25th Saturday July Venue: Aladja Community Town Hall Time: 12noon.

Jul 23, 2020

Quantum physicists crack mystery of ‘strange metals,’ a new state of matter

Posted by in categories: cosmology, quantum physics

Even by the standards of quantum physicists, strange metals are just plain odd. The materials are related to high-temperature superconductors and have surprising connections to the properties of black holes. Electrons in strange metals dissipate energy as fast as they’re allowed to under the laws of quantum mechanics, and the electrical resistivity of a strange metal, unlike that of ordinary metals, is proportional to the temperature.

Generating a theoretical understanding of strange metals is one of the biggest challenges in condensed matter physics. Now, using cutting-edge computational techniques, researchers from the Flatiron Institute in New York City and Cornell University have solved the first robust theoretical model of strange metals. The work reveals that strange metals are a new state of matter, the researchers report July 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The fact that we call them strange metals should tell you how well we understand them,” says study co-author Olivier Parcollet, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Quantum Physics (CCQ). “Strange metals share remarkable properties with black holes, opening exciting new directions for theoretical physics.”