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May 9, 2019

Stem cell scientists clear another hurdle in creating transplant arteries

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, finance

Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death worldwide, and treating it isn’t easy. The disease wreaks havoc on patients’ blood vessels and can require complex bypass surgery.

Scientists at the Morgridge Institute for Research are working toward a dream of creating artery banks—similar to banks common today—with readily-available material to replace diseased arteries during surgery.

The latest work in the lab of Morgridge regenerative biologist James Thomson puts the science one step closer to that goal.

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May 9, 2019

Blue Moon

Posted by in category: space travel

Earth, in all its beauty, is just our starting place. Blue Origin is opening the promise of space to all.

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May 9, 2019

Reversible chemistry clears path for safer batteries

Posted by in categories: chemistry, energy, military

Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) and US Army Research Lab (ARL) have taken a critical step on the path to high energy batteries by improving their water-in-salt battery with a new type of chemical transformation of the cathode that creates a reversible solid salt layer, a phenomenon yet unknown in the field of water-based batteries.

Building on their previous discoveries of the water-in-salt electrolytes reported in Science in 2015, the researchers added a new cathode. This new cathode material, lacking , operates at an average potential of 4.2 volts with excellent cycling stability, and delivers an unprecedented comparable, or perhaps higher than, non-aqueous Li-ion batteries. The authors report their work on May 9 in the journal Nature.

“The University of Maryland and ARL research has produced the most creative new chemistry I have seen in at least 10 years,” said Prof. Jeffrey Dahn of Dalhousie University in Canada, an expert in the field not affiliated with the research. “However, it remains to be seen if a practical device with long lifetime can be created.”

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May 9, 2019

California Flips Switch on First Grid-Connected Flow Battery

Posted by in category: futurism

Flow batteries, an emerging technology, could be more durable and hardy than the most popular grid-scale batteries in use today. Now, California’s independent system operator has hooked one up.

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May 9, 2019

ET might use gravitational waves to communicate, researchers

Posted by in category: physics

A minor change to interferometer parameters might reveal the Earth is not alone. Andrew Masterson reports.

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May 9, 2019

The power of randomization: Magnetic skyrmions for novel computer technology

Posted by in categories: computing, entertainment, nanotechnology

Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have succeeded in developing a key constituent of a novel unconventional computing concept. This constituent employs the same magnetic structures that are being researched in connection with storing electronic data on shift registers known as racetracks. In this, researchers investigate so-called skyrmions, which are magnetic vortex-like structures, as potential bit units for data storage. However, the recently announced new approach has a particular relevance to probabilistic computing. This is an alternative concept for electronic data processing where information is transferred in the form of probabilities rather than in the conventional binary form of 1 and 0. The number 2/3, for instance, could be expressed as a long sequence of 1 and 0 digits, with 2/3 being ones and 1/3 being zeros. The key element lacking in this approach was a functioning bit reshuffler, i.e., a device that randomly rearranges a sequence of digits without changing the total number of 1s and 0s in the sequence. That is exactly what the skyrmions are intended to achieve. The results of this research have been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers used thin magnetic metallic films for their investigations. These were examined in Mainz under a special microscope that made the magnetic alignments in the metallic films visible. The films have the special characteristic of being magnetized in vertical alignment to the film plane, which makes stabilization of the magnetic skyrmions possible in the first place. Skyrmions can basically be imagined as small magnetic vortices, similar to hair whorls. These structures exhibit a so-called topological stabilization that protects them from collapsing too easily – as a hair whorl resists being easily straightened. It is precisely this characteristic that makes skyrmions very promising when it comes to use in technical applications such as, in this particular case, information storage. The advantage is that the increased stability reduces the probability of unintentional data loss and ensures the overall quantity of bits is maintained.

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May 9, 2019

A.I. Can Now Read Your Thoughts—And Turn Them Into Words and Images

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

That’s just the beginning: A.I. brain implants might be next.

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May 9, 2019

Dark matter: ‘Rarest event EVER’ recorded by scientists — lasting 18 SEXTILLION years

Posted by in category: cosmology

A PROCESS taking more than one trillion times the age of the universe to complete has finally been measured by scientists hunting for dark matter.

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May 9, 2019

Machine learning reveals metabolic pathways disrupted by the drugs, offering new targets to combat resistance

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Most antibiotics work by interfering with critical functions such as DNA replication or construction of the bacterial cell wall. However, these mechanisms represent only part of the full picture of how antibiotics act.

In a new study of antibiotic action, MIT researchers developed a new machine-learning approach to discover an additional mechanism that helps some antibiotics kill bacteria. This secondary mechanism involves activating the bacterial metabolism of nucleotides that the cells need to replicate their DNA.

“There are dramatic energy demands placed on the cell as a result of the drug stress. These energy demands require a , and some of the metabolic byproducts are toxic and help contribute to killing the cells,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, and the senior author of the study.

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May 9, 2019

Generating multiphoton quantum states on silicon

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

In a recent study now published in Light: Science & Applications, Ming Zhang, Lan-Tian Feng and an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the departments of quantum information, quantum physics and modern optical instrumentation in China, detailed a new technique to generate photon-pairs for use in quantum devices. In the study, they used a method known as four-wave mixing to allow three electromagnetic fields to interact and produce a fourth field. The team created the quantum states in a silicon nanophotonic spiral waveguide to produce bright, tunable, stable and scalable multiphoton quantum states. The technology is comparable with the existing fiber and integrated circuit manufacturing processes to pave the way to engineer a range of new generation photonic quantum technologies for applications in quantum communication, computation and imaging. The multiphoton quantum sources detailed in the work will play a critical role to improve the existing understanding of quantum information.

The scientists generated multiphoton quantum states using a single-silicon nanophotonic waveguide and detected four-photon states with a low pump power of 600 µW to achieve experimental multiphoton quantum interference verified with quantum state tomography. Zhang and Feng et al. recorded the quantum interference visibilities at a value greater than 95 percent with . The multiphoton quantum source is fully compatible with on-chip processes of quantum manipulation and quantum detection to form large-scale quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs). The work has significant potential for multiphoton quantum research.

Multiphoton quantum sources are critical to build several practical platforms for quantum communication, computation, simulation and metrology. Physicists have made great efforts to realize high quality, bright and scalable multiphoton quantum states in previous work, to activate powerful quantum technologies by multiplexing several biphoton sources to generate eight-photon and 10-photon entanglement. However, the efficacy of such multiplexing systems decreased with the number of entangled photons. At present, quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPCIs) and silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology remain promising to realize high quality photon-pair sources.

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