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Aug 8, 2020

Microplastics have moved into virtually every crevice on Earth

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics

O,.o Maybe nanomagnets could essentially collect these particles in the future or an enzyme could be introduced.


A collection of new research provides more clues about where and how microplastics are spreading.

Aug 8, 2020

Viewpoint: Calling gene-edited crops ‘natural’ won’t dispel public skepticism. Here’s a better way to build trust in CRISPR

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, food, genetics

What determines whether a genetically modified vegetable or fruit is natural?

Aug 8, 2020

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s plans to colonize space are even crazier than we thought

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

As a child, Elon Musk would read comic books and sci-fi novels and dream of fantastical worlds. Now the tech entrepreneur is on the verge of visiting one.

Musk’s focus narrowed some 20 years ago while poking around NASA’s website. He noticed that there was no timetable for a manned mission to Mars. He later called the lack of vision “shocking.”

Musk, then already a millionaire from the sale of a software company, ditched Silicon Valley for Los Angeles, in order to be closer to the aerospace industry, and set his sights on the stars.

Aug 8, 2020

Coronavirus severely restricts Antarctic science

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, science

Keeping Covid out of Antarctica means little research will be done on the continent in 2020–2021.

Aug 8, 2020

New Quantum Approach for Sharing Secrets Sets a Record With 11 Dimensions

Posted by in category: quantum physics

Wits Researchers have demonstrated a new quantum approach for sharing a secret amongst many parties, setting a new record for the highest dimensions and parties to date.

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, have demonstrated a record setting quantum protocol for sharing a secret amongst many parties. The team created an 11-dimensional quantum state and used it to share a secret amongst 10 parties. By using quantum tricks, the secret can only be unlocked if the parties trust one another. The work sets a new record for the dimension of the state (which impacts on how big the secret can be) and the number of parties with whom it is shared and is an important step towards distributing information securely across many nodes in a quantum network.

Laser & Photonics Reviews published online the research by the Wits team led by Professor Andrew Forbes from the School of Physics at Wits University. In their paper titled: Experimental Demonstration of 11-Dimensional 10-Party Quantum Secret Sharing, the Wits team beat all prior records to share a quantum secret.

Aug 8, 2020

Materials science researchers develop first electrically injected laser

Posted by in categories: computing, science

Materials science researchers, led by electrical engineering professor Shui-Qing “Fisher” Yu, have demonstrated the first electrically injected laser made with germanium tin.

Used as a semiconducting material for circuits on , the could improve micro-processing speed and efficiency at much lower costs.

In tests, the laser operated in pulsed conditions up to 100 kelvins, or 279 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Aug 8, 2020

Doctors experiment with stem cell therapy on COVID-19 patients

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Doctors are hoping stem cell therapy could be a weapon in the fight against coronavirus. On Friday, regenerative medicine company Mesoblast announced a 300-person trial to determine whether stem cell treatments will work in COVID-19 patients suffering from severe lung inflammation.

One hospital in New York tried it as an experiment with 12 patients, 10 of whom were able to come off of ventilators.

“What we saw in the very first patient was that within four hours of getting the cells, a lot of her parameters started to get better,” Dr. Karen Osman, who led the team at Mount Sinai, told CBS News’ Adriana Diaz.

Aug 8, 2020

Mysterious ‘fast radio burst’ detected closer to Earth than ever before

Posted by in category: space

Most FRBs originate hundreds of millions of light-years away. This one came from inside the Milky Way.

Aug 8, 2020

Hacker posts confidential Intel specs online

Posted by in category: security

Intel suffered a massive breach Thursday as 20 GB of internal documents were published online.

The confidential documents contain data on the internal designs of chipsets dating back to 2016.

The data were sent by an anonymous source to a Swiss software engineer, Till Kottmann, who specializes in uploading hacked documents. He does so, he has said, to encourage companies to exercise more caution concerning security and “to better find and assess potential issues.” But he admits he is also motivated to release unauthorized documents obtained from hackers “to free information” for all to see.

Aug 8, 2020

New reconfigurable circuits for a wide range of applications

Posted by in categories: computing, electronics

Electronic components that can process information with high levels of efficiency are crucial for the development of most contemporary devices and computational tools. Reconfigurable electronics, flexible systems that can change configurations to best utilize available hardware resources, are a possible solution for enhancing processing efficiency.

Researchers at Nanjing University and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan have recently designed new reconfigurable circuits with advanced shape-morphing and information processing capabilities. These logic and neuromorphic circuits, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, were fabricated using 2-D tungsten diselenide, an commonly used in the development of electronics.

“Current mainstream reconfigurable circuits (such as the field programmable gate array, FPGA) are based on traditional silicon circuits, using P-type or N-type field effect transistors with ‘fixed’ electrical characteristics,” Feng Miao, the researcher who led the study, told TechXplore. “For example, PN junction is always reverse-biased, and varying the drain polarity does not add new switching functionalities. Thus, these reconfigurable circuits need to use a lot of transistor resources to build complex circuit structures and eventually realize reconfigurable computing capabilities at the circuit level.”