ESA’s Prometheus is the precursor of ultra-low-cost rocket propulsion that is flexible enough to fit a fleet of new launch vehicles for any mission and will be potentially reusable.
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Now that they exist it certainly will change the world.
Waste heat is all around you. On a small scale, if your phone or laptop feels warm, that’s because some of the energy powering the device is being transformed into unwanted heat.
It’s always exciting when you can bridge two different physical concepts that seem to have nothing in common—and it’s even more thrilling when the results have as broad a range of possible fields of application as from fault-tolerant quantum computation to quantum gravity.
Physicists love to draw connections between distinct ideas, interconnecting concepts and theories to uncover new structure in the landscape of scientific knowledge. Put together information theory with quantum mechanics and you’ve opened a whole new field of quantum information theory. More recently, machine learning tools have been combined with many-body physics to find new ways to identify phases of matter, and ideas from quantum computing were applied to Pozner molecules to obtain new plausible models of how the brain might work.
In a recent contribution, my collaborators and I took a shot at combining the two physical concepts of quantum error correction and physical symmetries. What can we say about a quantum error-correcting code that conforms to a physical symmetry? Surprisingly, a continuous symmetry prevents the code from doing its job: A code can conform well to the symmetry, or it can correct against errors accurately, but it cannot do both simultaneously.
By drawing inspiration from the structures and functionalities of squid skin cells, a team of researchers designed and engineered human cells that contain stimuli-responsive photonic architectures and, as a consequence, possess the ability to change their appearance and transmission of light.
Oligodendrocytes and astrocytes displayed more differences in the human evolutionary lineage than neurons as compared to similar cells in other primates. Credit: Pavel Odinev/ Skoltech.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have a utilization (or capacity) factor of 15–20% worldwide. We propose to enhance the energy yield in a software-defined manner by complementing commodity solar PV systems with cloud-based IoT-controlled reflectors. We also propose designs for brownfield and greenfield settings in solar farms. We study a number of practical engineering issues including effect of solar azimuth, shadowing effects, ground coverage ratio (GCR) tradeoff, constraints on angular control etc. Our designs can raise solar PV energy yield between 50–100% with modest tradeoffs on operational complexity, land requirements (ground coverage ratio) etc. The software-defined IoT control allows a variety of current and future operational or business constraints to be flexibly factored in to tradeoff these factors versus economic gain (eg: levelized cost of energy, LCOE). The paper presents both simulation and experimental evidence for our system. We are actively piloting this technology with solar PV developers and engineering, procurement, construction (EPC) companies in emerging markets.
This work on one-cell embryos could advance our knowledge of the mechanisms that underpin cellular behaviour in general, and may ultimately provide insights into what goes wrong in aging and disease.
For the first time, scientists have added microscopic tracking devices into the interior of cells, giving a peek into how development starts.
Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated.
Like all countries, China is facing severe economic losses from the pandemic, and that will certainly have a negative impact on scientific research, because funding will be reduced and projects will be delayed, says physicist Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. Some universities have already announced a cut in funding. The research budget given by the education ministry to Jiangnan University in Wuxi, for example, will drop by more than 25% for 2020, and other universities are facing similar reductions. “An overall budget cutting of government spending on higher education is highly possible, though the level and scope may vary by regions, universities and fields,” says Tang Li, a science-policy scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai.
The country is rapidly gaining on the United States in research, but problems could slow its rise: part 5 in a series on science after the pandemic.
Radium monofluoride produced at CERN is ideal for measuring the electron electric dipole moment.