Toggle light / dark theme

A giant, sprawling structure almost a mile long has been discovered at the southern tip of Mexico, with researchers saying it may represent the oldest and largest monument of the ancient Maya civilisation ever found.

The site, called Aguada Fénix, is located in the state of Tabasco, at the base of the Gulf of Mexico. It’s so vast for its age, the find is making archaeologists recalibrate their timelines on the architectural capabilities of the mysterious Maya.

Before now, the Maya site of Ceibal (aka Seibal) was thought to be the oldest ceremonial centre, dating back to around 950 BCE.

It turns out that you don’t need a computer to create an artificial intelligence. In fact, you don’t even need electricity.

In an extraordinary bit of left-field research, scientists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison have found a way to create artificially intelligent glass that can recognize images without any need for sensors, circuits, or even a power source — and it could one day save your phone’s battery life.

“We’re always thinking about how we provide vision for machines in the future, and imagining application specific, mission-driven technologies,” researcher Zongfu Yu said in a press release. “This changes almost everything about how we design machine vision.”

Polarization, the direction in which light vibrates, is invisible to the human eye. Yet, so much of our optical world relies on the control and manipulation of this hidden quality of light.

Materials that can manipulate the polarization of —known as birefringent materials—are used in everything from digital alarm clocks to medical diagnostics, communications and astronomy.

Just as light’s polarization can vibrate along a straight line or an ellipse, materials can also be linearly or elliptically birefringent. Today, most birefringent materials are intrinsically linear, meaning they can only manipulate the polarization of light in a limited way. If you want to achieve broad polarization manipulation, you need to stack multiple birefringent materials on top of one another, making these devices bulky and inefficient.

Unprecedented View

The researchers believe this new nanoscale imaging technique could lead to the development of new materials and drugs, as well as the creation of better quantum computing systems.

“We can now see something that we couldn’t see before,” researcher Christopher Lutz told The New York Times. “So our imagination can go to a whole bunch of new ideas that we can test out with this technology.”

The truth about graphene. Ever since it was first discovered in 2004, graphene has been hailed as one of the most important breakthroughs in materials since the plastics revolution more than a century ago. The early predictions were that graphene would almost immediately enable the kinds of products and technologies that we’re used to seeing in sci-fi movies. Cut to more than a decade and a half later and that still hasn’t happened. Not even close. With opinions split between people overhyping graphene or calling it a massive disappointment, it’s time we got to the truth of what is really happening with this so-called ‘wonder material’.

▻ Watch the truth about solid state batteries — how close are they?: https://youtu.be/x8FEyaZxqAU

▻ Full script and citations: https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/2020/5/20/the-truth-about-g…he-hold-up

——————-

Researchers have long sought to understand the origins of life on Earth. A new study conducted by scientists at the Institute for Advanced Study, the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), and the University of New South Wales, among other participating institutions, marks an important step forward in the effort to understand the chemical origins of life. The findings of this study demonstrate how “continuous reaction networks” are capable of producing RNA precursors and possibly ultimately RNA itself — a critical bridge to life.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While many of the mechanisms that propagate life are well understood, the transition from a prebiotic Earth to the era of biology remains shrouded in mystery. Previous experiments have demonstrated that simple organic compounds can be produced from the reactions of chemicals understood to exist in the primitive Earth environment. However, many of these experiments relied on coordinated experimenter interventions. This study goes further by employing a model that is minimally manipulated to most accurately simulate a natural environment.