SLAC invention uses terahertz radiation to power a miniscule copper accelerator structure.
Particle accelerators generate high-energy beams of electrons, protons and ions for a wide range of applications, including particle colliders that shed light on nature’s subatomic components, X-ray lasers that film atoms and molecules during chemical reactions and medical devices for treating cancer.
As a rule of thumb, the longer the accelerator, the more powerful it is. Now, a team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has invented a new type of accelerator structure that delivers a 10 times larger energy gain over a given distance than conventional ones. This could make accelerators used for a given application 10 times shorter.
Elon Musk recently clarified that Tesla’s new 4680 cells are already being deployed in some of its vehicles as prototypes. Even more interesting is that the next-generation batteries have already been in use for several months, though the CEO did not state which of its vehicles are equipped with the 4680 Roadrunner batteries.
The Tesla CEO related his update in a recent post on Twitter. While responding to a question about the company’s strategy with its cathodes and its suppliers, Musk noted that Tesla’s own battery cells are already powering some of its cars. That being said, Musk clarified that ultimately, prototypes such as cars that currently run on the company’s 4680 cells are trivial, as they are incomparably simpler than actual volume production.
Researchers identified five unapproved drugs in dangerous combinations and doses in over-the-counter cognitive enhancement drugs. Side effects of the unapproved drugs include increases and decreases in blood pressure, agitation, and sedation.approved drugs in dangerous combinations and doses in over-the-counter cognitive enhancement drugs. Side effects of the unapproved drugs include increases and decreases in blood pressure, agitation, and sedation.approved drugs in dangerous combinations and doses in over-the-counter cognitive enhancement drugs. Side effects of the unapproved drugs include increases and decreases in blood pressure, agitation, and sedation.
To show that this works, the researchers used a seismometer station on Diego Garcia, a small atoll in the Indian Ocean about 3,000 kilometers from Sumatra. The tectonic plate boundary there is incredibly active, so there’s no shortage of earthquakes to work with. Between 2004 and 2016, there were over 4,000 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or higher that occurred near the Nias Island area of Sumatra. The researchers carefully processed all of these events to find repeaters similar enough to do the temperature calculation. They found over 2,000 such pairs based on 900 earthquakes.
If this portion of the Indian Ocean were to warm 1° C, T-waves from those earthquakes would take 5.4 seconds longer to reach this seismometer. The observed changes are smaller than that but they are coherent—there’s both an annual cycle and a gradual warming trend that look similar to other, more traditional datasets.
Astrophysicists at the University of Jena (Germany) prove that dust particles in space are mixed with ice.
The matter between the stars in a galaxy – called the interstellar medium – consists not only of gas, but also of a great deal of dust. At some point in time, stars and planets originated in such an environment, because the dust particles can clump together and merge into celestial bodies. Important chemical processes also take place on these particles, from which complex organic – possibly even prebiotic – molecules emerge. However, for these processes to be possible, there has to be water. In particularly cold cosmic environments, water occurs in the form of ice. Until now, however, the connection between ice and dust in these regions of space was unclear. A research team from Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has now proven that the dust particles and the ice are mixed. They report their findings in the current issue of the research journal Nature Astronomy.
Better modelling of physico-chemical processes in space.
KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan (Reuters) — Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visited a low-key but critical maintenance base for fighter jet engines on Saturday, offering encouragement as the Chinese-claimed island’s armed forces strain in the face of repeated Chinese air force incursions.
This month alone, China’s drills have included its jets crossing the mid-line of the sensitive Taiwan Strait and exercising near the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands in the South China Sea.
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?
It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but now a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, says he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
David Sinclair wants to slow down and ultimately reverse aging. Sinclair sees aging as a disease and he is convinced aging is caused by epigenetic changes, abnormalities that occur when the body’s cells process extra or missing pieces of DNA. This results in the loss of the information that keeps our cells healthy. This information also tells the cells which genes to read. David Sinclair’s book: “Lifespan, why we age and why we don’t have to”, he describes the results of his research, theories and scientific philosophy as well as the potential consequences of the significant progress in genetic technologies.
At present, researchers are only just beginning to understand the biological basis of aging even in relatively simple and short-lived organisms such as yeast. Sinclair however, makes a convincing argument for why the life-extension technologies will eventually offer possibilities of life prolongation using genetic engineering.
He and his team recently developed two artificial intelligence algorithms that predict biological age in mice and when they will die. This will pave the way for similar machine learning models in people. The loss of epigenetic information is likely the root cause of aging. By analogy, If DNA is the digital information on a compact disc, then aging is due to scratches. What we are searching for, is the polish.
Every time a cell divides, the DNA strands at the ends of your chromosomes replicate in order to copy all the genetic information to each new cell, and this process is not perfect. Over time, however, the ends of your chromosomes can become scrambled.
For mouthless, lungless bacteria, breathing is a bit more complicated than it is for humans.
We inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide; Geobacter — a ubiquitous, groundwater-dwelling genus of bacteria — swallow up organic waste and ‘exhale’ electrons, generating a tiny electric current in the process.
Those waste electrons always need somewhere to go (usually into a plentiful underground mineral like iron oxide), and Geobacter have an unconventional tool to make sure they get there.
