Lifeboat Foundation

A scientific breakthrough on the tiniest scale could soon help us answer the universe’s greatest mysteries.

Kamiokande-II saw the first supernova neutrinos from the famous SN 1987A.

Every few seconds, somewhere in the observable Universe, a massive star collapses and unleashes a supernova explosion. Japan’s Super-Kamiokande observatory might now be collecting a steady trickle of neutrinos from those cataclysms, physicists say — amounting to a few detections a year.

These tiny subatomic particles are central to understanding what goes on inside a supernova: because they zip out of the star’s collapsing core and across space, they can provide information about any potentially new physics that occur under extreme conditions.

Continue reading “Huge neutrino detector sees first hints of particles from exploding stars” »

Researchers have developed a pH-responsive nanorobot system that changes confirmation in the tumor microenvironment to selectively kill cancer cells in mice.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) have recently developed a nanorobot system capable of killing cancer cells in mice. This system works by activating at lower pH, such as within the tumor microenvironment. It is hoped that this could serve as a proof-of-concept for similar stimulus-responsive nanorobotic approaches and introduce a new range of effective cancer therapeutics.

Certain membrane proteins capable of inducing apoptosis, a type of cell death, appear on the surface of both healthy and cancer cells. These proteins, often called death receptors, join and activate when in close proximity to each other. This closeness is induced by external factors binding to the cell surface.

Fab 29.1 and Fab 29.2 will span roughly 81,000 square meters, with a combined length of 530 meters and a width of 153 meters. Including roof structures for air conditioning and heating, the buildings will reach a height of 36.7 meters, with several underground floors as well. The cross-section plans show multiple above-ground floors with heights ranging from 5.7 to 6.5 meters.

Initially, construction of Intel’s Fab 29 was scheduled to begin in the first half of 2023, but delays in subsidy approvals pushed the start to the summer of 2024. Recently it turned out that construction of Intel’s Fab 29 modules 1 and 2 near Magdeburg, Germany, has been delayed to May 2025 due to the pending approval of EU subsidies and the requirement to relocate black soil for reuse at another site.

Intel’s Fab 29 modules 1 and 2 were initially scheduled to start operations in late 2027 and make chips on Intel’s 14A (1.4nm) and 10A (1nm) production nodes. Typically, Intel launches new client PC products in the second half of the year and ramps up production in the first half. The fabs were intended to produce client PC products set for release in the second half of 2028. Although production could begin if the fabs were ready by mid-2028, the timeline would be tight. However, some of the latest reports indicate a different schedule, estimating four to five years for construction, with production now expected to start between 2029 and 2030.

Primordial black holes are tiny versions of the big beasts you typically think of. They’re so small, they could easily fit inside stuff, like a planet, or a star… or a person. So, needless to say, this has piqued the curiosity of our Dead Planeteers.

Leah and Chelsea want to know, can you put primordial black holes inside things and what happens if you do?

Continue reading “Putting Black Holes Inside Stuff | Dead Planets Society Podcast” »

Researchers used supercomputers to create nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the cosmos.

Researchers are diving into a synthetic universe to help us better understand the real one. Using supercomputers at the U.S. DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, scientists have created nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by NSF (the National Science Foundation) and DOE, in Chile will see it.

Michael Troxel, an associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, led the simulation campaign as part of a broader project called OpenUniverse. The team is now releasing a 10-terabyte subset of this data, with the remaining 390 terabytes to follow this fall once they’ve been processed.

A research team led by Professor Jang-Sik Lee from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Semiconductor Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) has significantly enhanced the data storage capacity of ferroelectric memory devices. By utilizing hafnia-based ferroelectric materials and an innovative device structure, their findings, published on June 7 in the international journal Science Advances, mark a substantial advancement in memory technology.

With the exponential growth in data production and processing due to advancements in electronics and artificial intelligence (AI), the importance of data storage technologies has surged. NAND flash memory, one of the most prevalent technologies for mass data storage, can store more data in the same area by stacking cells in a three-dimensional structure rather than a planar one. However, this approach relies on charge traps to store data, which results in higher operating voltages and slower speeds.

Recently, hafnia-based ferroelectric memory has emerged as a promising next-generation memory technology. Hafnia (Hafnium oxide) enables ferroelectric memories to operate at low voltages and high speeds. However, a significant challenge has been the limited memory window for multilevel data storage.

Herbert Ong Brighter with Herbert.

David is one of the world’s best-known philosophers of mind and thought leaders on consciousness. I was a freshman at the University of Toronto when I first read some of his work. Since then, Chalmers has been one of the few philosophers (together with Nick Bostrom) who has written and spoken publicly about the Matrix simulation argument and the technological singularity. (See, for example, David’s presentation at the 2009 Singularity Summit or read his The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis)

During our conversation with David, we discuss topics such as: how and why Chalmers got interested in philosophy; and his search to answer what he considers to be some of the biggest questions – issues such as the nature of reality, consciousness, and artificial intelligence; the fact that academia in general and philosophy, in particular, doesn’t seem to engage technology; our chances of surviving the technological singularity; the importance of Watson, the Turing Test and other benchmarks on the way to the singularity; consciousness, recursive self-improvement, and artificial intelligence; the ever-shrinking of the domain of solely human expertise; mind uploading and what he calls the hard problem of consciousness; the usefulness of philosophy and ethics; religion, immortality, and life-extension; reverse engineering long-dead people such as Ray Kurzweil’s father.

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