A new type of battery has been developed that could revolutionise electric vehicle use with a recharge time of just 15 seconds.
The first performance numbers from SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service are coming in and they’re looking great. End-user terminal production numbers, though, are another matter.
How much control do you have over your thoughts? What if you were specifically told not to think of something—like a pink elephant?
A recent study led by UNSW psychologists has mapped what happens in the brain when a person tries to suppress a thought. The neuroscientists managed to ‘decode’ the complex brain activity using functional brain imaging (called fMRI) and an imaging algorithm.
The findings suggest that even when a person succeeds in ignoring a thought, like the pink elephant, it can still exist in another part of the brain—without them being aware of it.
A third — the most out-there among the three — is designed to seat 200 passengers. The concept merges the wings with the main body, creating a massive open space. “The exceptionally wide fuselage opens up multiple options for hydrogen storage and distribution, and for cabin layout,” an Airbus statement reads.
Airbus is hoping to drum up excitement around the idea of powering the planes of tomorrow using hydrogen gas. “The transition to hydrogen, as the primary power source for these concept planes, will require decisive action from the entire aviation ecosystem,” Airbus CEO Guillaume Faury said in the statement.
“I strongly believe that the use of hydrogen — both in synthetic fuels and as a primary power source for commercial aircraft — has the potential to significantly reduce aviation’s climate impact,” he added.
Just in case you haven’t heard, Long Way Up is the third installment in Ewan McGregor’s and Charlie Boorman’s trilogy of long-distance motorcycle adventure rides.
What makes this one so special, though, is that the duo set out on a pair of Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric motorcycles, attempting to cover 15,000 miles (25,000 km) of incredibly remote terrain from the southern tip of Argentina all the way to Los Angeles.
[Author’s Note: There are no major spoilers here; you’re safe to keep reading.].
Researchers have created a molecule in a single, precisely characterized quantum state by merging two carefully prepared atoms.
Researchers have demonstrated a quantum molecular assembler—a device that takes individual atoms as inputs and merges them into a molecule in a desired quantum state. The team used lasers to trap and cool one sodium (Na) atom and one cesium (Cs) atom, bring them together, and merge them into an NaCs molecule in a specific quantum state. Such a quantum-controlled molecule is a promising building block for quantum computers and could help researchers study the quantum details of chemical reactions.
In a delightful alignment of astronomy and mathematics, scientists at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a “pi Earth”—an Earth-sized planet that zips around its star every 3.14 days, in an orbit reminiscent of the universal mathematics constant.
The researchers discovered signals of the planet in data taken in 2017 by the NASA Kepler Space Telescope’s K2 mission. By zeroing in on the system earlier this year with SPECULOOS, a network of ground-based telescopes, the team confirmed that the signals were of a planet orbiting its star. And indeed, the planet appears to still be circling its star today, with a pi-like period, every 3.14 days.
“The planet moves like clockwork,” says Prajwal Niraula, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), who is the lead author of a paper published today in the Astronomical Journal, titled: “π Earth: a 3.14-day Earth-sized Planet from K2’s Kitchen Served Warm by the SPECULOOS Team.”
Circa 2008
Cytokinesis partitions the cell by a cleavage furrow in animals but by a new cross wall in plants. How this new wall assembles at the molecular level and connects with the mother cell wall remains unclear. A lethal Arabidopsis embryogenesis mutant designated root-, shoot-, hypocotyl-defective (rsh) provides some clues: RSH encodes extensin AtEXT3, a structural glycoprotein located in the nascent cross wall or “cell plate” and also in mature cell walls. Here we report that electron micrographs of rsh mutant cells lacking RSH extensin correspond to a wall phenotype typified by incomplete cross wall assembly. Biochemical characterization of the purified RSH glycoprotein isolated from wild-type Arabidopsis cell cultures confirmed its identity as AtEXT3: a (hydroxy)proline-rich glyco protein comprising 11 identical amphiphilic peptide repeats with a 28-residue periodicity: SOOOOKKHYVYKSOOOOVKHYSOOOVYH (O = Hyp), each repeat containing a hydrophobic isodityrosine cross-link motif (YVY, underlined). Atomic force microscopy of RSH glycoprotein imaged its propensity for self-assembly into a dendritic scaffold. Extensin peroxidase catalyzed in vitro formation of insoluble RSH gels with concomitant tyrosine cross-linking, hence this likelihood in muro. We conclude that self-assembling amphiphiles of lysine-rich RSH extensin form positively charged scaffolds in the cell plate. These react with negatively charged pectin to create an extensin pectate coacervate that may template further orderly deposition of the new cross wall at cytokinesis.
Conflict of interest statement
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The idea is to make space livable for everyday folks rather than only specially-trained astronauts.
Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research.
Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects.
It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed limit would destroy the superfluid. Prior experiments in Lancaster have found that it is not a strict rule and objects can move at much greater speeds without destroying the fragile superfluid state.