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“Australia Just Changed Batteries Forever”: Quantum Tech Unleashed With 1,000 Times the Life, Leaving Global Energy Giants Reeling in Shock

A quantum battery operates on the principles of quantum mechanics, diverging from traditional batteries which rely on ion flow for charging and discharging. In quantum batteries, energy is stored by moving electrons into higher energy states with photons acting as charge carriers. During charging, photons transfer their energy to electrons, enabling storage.

Key quantum properties, such as entanglement and superabsorption, are harnessed to enhance the charging rate. Entanglement allows particles to function cohesively during the charging or discharging process, while superabsorption increases the energy storage capacity, leading to higher energy densities. Despite their theoretical potential and scalability, practical quantum batteries have faced challenges, with existing prototypes unable to sustain energy beyond a few nanoseconds.

“This Battery Breaks Every Rule”: Scientists Unveil Groundbreaking Water Battery That Delivers 220 Full Cycles With Zero Capacity Loss or Performance Drop

Ukraine to be the first in Europe to launch Starlink mobile Internet

«Kyivstar» plans to launch new Starlink services this year. Their range and capabilities will be expanded over time.

Oleksandr Komarov, CEO of «Kyivstar», told the agency about the company’s plans to Reuters in Rome. According to him, messaging will be launched by the end of 2025, and mobile satellite broadband will be launched in mid-2026.

Field tests of the new communication began in late 2024 as part of an agreement with SpaceX. For its part, Elon Musk’s space company will launch the possibility of direct communication with mobile phones in the country.

Could AI extend your life indefinitely? Futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks so

As AI infiltrates every aspect of our lives, who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? In this special three-part series, you’ll hear from the people predicting and shaping our tech future. Host Manoush Zomorodi reports on the latest and revisits her favorite conversations with the minds crafting the digital world we live in today: what they’ve gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we’re headed next. Part 1 features futurist Ray Kurzweil and counterculture icon Stewart Brand. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted.

Intel CEO says it’s “too late” for them to catch up with AI competition — reportedly claims Intel has fallen out of the “top 10 semiconductor companies” as the firm lays off thousands across the world

Dark days ahead, or perhaps already here.

We’ll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims

Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google, has claimed that in just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become ‘digitally immortal’.

Protein Dynamics Predicted Rapidly with Generative AI Model, BioEmu

A newly developed generative AI model is helping researchers explore protein dynamics with increased speed. The deep learning system, called BioEmu, predicts the full range of conformations a protein can adopt, modeling the structural ensembles that underlie protein function.

The work, in a paper titled “Scalable emulation of protein equilibrium ensembles with generative deep learning,” was published in Science. Researchers developed BioEmu as a high-speed emulator of protein motion, capable of generating thousands of conformational states in just one GPU-hour, significantly outperforming traditional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations.

Understanding protein function has been a challenge, often hinging not on a single structural component of the protein, but on the combined ensemble of shapes within the protein. Proteins frequently shift between different conformations depending on their interactions or environment, which has been a challenge for other methods to capture accurately.

Large-scale DNA study maps 37,000 years of disease history

A research team led by Eske Willerslev, professor at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Cambridge, has recovered ancient DNA from 214 known human pathogens in prehistoric humans from Eurasia.

The study shows, among other things, that the earliest known evidence of zoonotic diseases—illnesses transmitted from animals to humans, like COVID in recent times—dates back to around 6,500 years ago, with such diseases becoming more widespread approximately 5,000 years ago.

“The spatiotemporal distribution of in ancient Eurasia” is the largest study to date on the history of infectious diseases and has been published in Nature.