05 Sci-Tech

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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com

 

Researchers at the University of Manchester and the University of Melbourne have developed an ultra-pure silicon crucial for creating scalable quantum computers, which could potentially address global challenges such as climate change and healthcare issues.

A major breakthrough in quantum computing has been achieved with the development of ultra-pure silicon, setting the stage for the creation of powerful, scalable quantum computers.

More than 100 years ago, scientists at The University of Manchester changed the world when they discovered the nucleus in atoms, marking the birth of nuclear physics.

Fast forward to today, and history repeats itself, this time in quantum computing.

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Excerpt from voi.id

JAKARTA – A group of TikTok creators filed a lawsuit in a US federal court on Tuesday, May 14 to block a law signed by US President Joe Biden. The law will force the divestment of a short video app used by 170 million Americans or ban it, arguing that the app has “deep impact on American life.”

Plaintiffs in the case include a Texas Marine Corps veteran who sells his farm products, a woman from Tennessee who sells cakes and talks about parenting, a college coach from North Dakota who made video sports comments, and a recent college graduate from North Carolina who advocates for rights for survivors of sexual violence.

“Although they come from different places, professions, backgrounds, and political views, they unite in the view that TikTok provides a unique and irreplaceable way for them to express themselves and form a community,” the lawsuit said.

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Excerpt from www.storyboard18.com

Microsoft Corp. and LinkedIn released the 2024 Work Trend Index, a joint report on the state of AI at work titled, “AI at work is here. Now comes the hard part.” The research — based on a survey of 31,000 people across 31 countries, labor and hiring trends on LinkedIn, trillions of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, and research with Fortune 500 customers — shows how, just one year in, AI is influencing the way people work, lead and hire around the world.

Microsoft also announced new capabilities in Copilot for Microsoft 365, and LinkedIn made free more than 50 learning courses for LinkedIn Premium subscribers designed to empower professionals at all levels to advance their AI aptitude, the companies said in a statement.

The data is in: 2024 is the year AI at work gets real. Use of generative AI at work has nearly doubled in the past six months. LinkedIn is seeing a significant increase in professionals adding AI skills to their profiles, and most leaders say they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills. But with many leaders worried their company lacks an AI vision, and employees bringing their own AI tools to work, leaders have reached the hard part of any tech disruption: moving from experimentation to tangible business impact.

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Excerpt from timesofindia.indiatimes.com

 

NEW DELHI: Nasa is preparing to send astronauts back to the moon and has announced its plan to construct first lunar railway system, known as FLOAT (Flexible Levitation on a Track). Engineers at Nasa ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California are currently developing the FLOAT system.
According to Nasa’s blog post, the project is designed to create a “robotic transport system” that will support the future lunar activities of astronauts visiting the moon, the space agency stressed on the importance of this transport system for the daily functioning of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030s.
A robotics expert at Nasa ‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ethan Schaler said, “We want to build the first lunar railway system, which will provide reliable, autonomous, and efficient payload transport on the Moon. A durable, long-life robotic transport system will be critical to the daily operations of a sustainable lunar base in the 2030’s, as envisioned in Nasa’s Moon to Mars plan and mission concepts like the Robotic Lunar Surface Operations 2 (RLSO2).
Based on Nasa ‘s initial design, FLOAT will be exclusively for machines.

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Excerpt from www.ndtv.com

In a rare incident of misconfiguration, Google accidentally deleted the account of a $125 billion pension fund, causing disruption for over half a million UniSuper members, who couldn’t access their superannuation accounts for a week.

UniSuper is an Australian superannuation fund that offers retirement savings services to employees working in the higher education and research sectors in the country. This means that if you work in universities, colleges, or research institutions in Australia, you may have access to UniSuper’s superannuation services to help you save for retirement.

The incident occurred from a “one-of-a-kind” misconfiguration on Google Cloud. UniSuper CEO Peter Chun and Google Cloud global CEO Thomas Kurian issued a joint apology to members, acknowledging the outage as “extremely frustrating and disappointing.” They assured members that the outage was not a cyber-attack and clarified that no personal data was compromised, blaming a glitch in Google’s cloud service, as reported by the Guardian.

The disruption arose from “an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services led to the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” they confirmed.

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Excerpt from www.techexplorist.com

Clonal expansions in dividing tissues appear as a tapestry with increasing age in humans; this is most visible in blood as clonal hematopoiesis (CH). CH, associated with aging-related phenotypes and cancer risk, is frequently caused by somatic mutations in a group of known genes. Most clones, though, don’t have identified drivers.

In a new study, scientists from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Calico Life Sciences, California, and the University of Cambridge have discovered 17 additional genes that drive the abnormal overgrowth of mutated blood cells as we age. The research provides crucial new information on the genetics behind clonal hemopoiesis, a process linked to aging and a higher risk of blood malignancies.

Scientists examined sequencing data from the UK Biobank cohort, which included over 200,000 people. They looked for genes exhibiting “positive selection” signals, which occur when mutations cause mutant cell populations to grow significantly over time.

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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com

 

Researchers at Princeton University have made a breakthrough in understanding kinetic magnetism by using ultracold atoms in a laser-built lattice to image a new type of polaron, revealing how impurity motion in an atomic array causes robust magnetism at high temperatures. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

The research team directly imaged the microscopic object responsible for this magnetism, an unusual type of polaron.

Not all magnets are the same. When we think of magnetism, we often think of magnets that stick to a refrigerator’s door. For these types of magnets, the electronic interactions that give rise to magnetism have been understood for around a century, since the early days of quantum mechanics. But there are many different forms of magnetism in nature, and scientists are still discovering the mechanisms that drive them.

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Excerpt from nationalinterest.org

Summary: Mike Sweeney’s essay, published by the U.S. Naval Institute, argues that submarines, not aircraft carriers, will dominate future naval warfare, especially in a potential conflict with China.

-Historian John Keegan’s insights support this view, emphasizing submarines’ stealth and versatility compared to carriers’ vulnerability. Despite its ambitious shipbuilding, China lags in developing quiet, capable nuclear submarines, making it a regional rather than a global naval power.

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Excerpt from globalnews.ca

The advisory warns cyber actors backed by Russia, China and other countries are increasingly targeting non-profit and advocacy groups, journalists and other civil society members.

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Excerpt from www.futurity.org

Decisions about which antibiotics to give a patient when a life-threatening infection is suspected may have unintended consequences for patient outcomes, a new study reveals.

Beginning in 2015, a 15-month national shortage of a commonly prescribed antibiotic, piperacillin/tazobactam, known by the brand name Zosyn, provided a unique opportunity to compare rates of death in hospitalized patients with sepsis who were administered two different types of antibiotics—one that spares the gut microbiome and one that profoundly alters it.

Piperacillin/tazobactam is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that is commonly administered for sepsis, a life-threatening complication from infection. In its absence, clinicians commonly instead use another antibiotic, cefepime, which has similar activity against common sepsis pathogens but, unlike piperacillin/tazobactam, has minimal effects on anaerobic gut bacteria.

“These are powerful antibiotics that are administered to patients every day in every hospital nationwide.”

 

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Excerpt from interestingengineering.com

China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has tested a new smart bomb-launching electromagnetic rail gun. According to reports, the weapon launched the bomb 9 miles (15km) into the stratosphere at Mach 5+.

However, the test did find some issues around projectile stability that sent the bomb off target. The PLAN will now conduct more research and development to rectify the issue.

According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the rail gun’s smart bomb projectile features a pair of gliding wings for guided descent. These wings enable the bomb to, in theory, follow a gentle curve and hit a target around 3 minutes after launch.

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Excerpt from www.popularmechanics.com

With the ease of starting a car, the crew of the USS Enterprise starship streaks to a new adventure in every episode of Star Trek, somehow traveling at several times the speed of light. This sci-fi mode of practical interstellar travel, which television audiences first saw in 1966, inspired Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya to investigate the feasibility of a real method for light-speed propulsion. Decades later, he published his cutting-edge research to an astonished community of theoretical physicists. The eponymous Alcubierre warp drive hypothetically contracts the spacetime in front of a spaceship while expanding the spacetime behind it, so that the ship moves from Point A to Point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed. By distorting spacetime—the continuum enfolding the three dimensions of space and time—an observer outside the ship’s “warp bubble” would see the ship moving faster than the speed of light, even though observers inside the craft would feel no acceleration forces.

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Excerpt from www.fcnp.com

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Excerpt from www.cbsnews.com

 

The geomagnetic storm that began on May 10, 2024, generated stunning aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, that could be seen as far south as Mexico. They also generated headaches for farmers whose GPS-guided tractors were idled in the middle of planting season.

Geomagnetic storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from the surface of the Sun and hits the Earth. This bubble is known as a coronal mass ejection. The plasma of a coronal mass ejection consists of a cloud of protons and electrons, which are electrically charged particles. When these particles reach the Earth, they interact with the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This interaction causes the magnetic field to distort and weaken, which in turn leads to the strange behavior of the aurora borealis and other natural phenomena.

The May 2024 storm, rated G5 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 1-to-5 Geomagnetic Storms scale, disrupted GPS communications enough to throw off tractor guidance, which requires centimeter-level precision. Stronger storms would have much more serious consequences. As an electrical engineer who specializes in the power grid, I study how geomagnetic storms also threaten to cause power and internet outages and how to protect against that.

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Excerpt from www.azorobotics.com

In a recent article published in the journal Sensors, researchers introduced a two-finger haptic robotic hand for manipulating objects with varying stiffness and shapes without causing damage or slippage. They employed force sensors and servomotor currents to categorize objects based on their stiffness and apply appropriate force for grasping and lifting. A novel impedance control algorithm that adjusts the stiffness and damping properties of the robotic fingers based on the object characteristics was also designed in this study.

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Excerpt from www.nature.com

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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com

Recent findings from the Tibetan Plateau show that its ancient inhabitants, despite harsh conditions, maintained significant cultural exchanges with northern China, suggesting expansive social networks during the Holocene period.

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the highest and largest plateau in the world, presents significant challenges to its inhabitants due to its harsh climate. A recent study has uncovered stone artifacts indicating increased cultural interactions between residents of the plateau and those on its borders.

“The Tibetan plateau has an average elevation of more than 4500 meters, which makes Colorado seem like it is at sea level. It’s amazing that people have been able to occupy this area on and off for at least the last 40,000 years,” said Stanley Ambrose (MME), a professor of anthropology. “Unfortunately, very little research has been done in this big area.”

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Excerpt from www.universetoday.com

Gravitational wave astronomy has been one of the hottest new types of astronomy ever since the LIGO consortium officially detected the first gravitational wave (GW) back in 2016. Astronomers were excited about the number of new questions that could be answered using this sensing technique that had never been considered before. But a lot of the nuance of the GWs that LIGO and other detectors have found in the 90 gravitational wave candidates they have found since 2016 is lost.

Researchers have a hard time determining which galaxy a gravitational wave comes from. But now, a new paper from researchers in the Netherlands has a strategy and developed some simulations that could help narrow down the search for the birthplace of GWs. To do so, they use another darling of astronomers everywhere—gravitational lensing.

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Excerpt from time.com

A portal linking New York City to Dublin via a livestream has been temporarily shut down after inappropriate behavior ensued, according to the Dublin City Council.

Less than a week after the 24/7 visual art installation was put in place, officials have opted to close it down temporarily after people began to flash each other, grind on the portal, and one person even shared pictures of the twin tower attack to people in New York City. Alternatively, the portal had also been the site of reunions with old friends and even a proposal, with many documenting their experience with the installation online.

The Dublin City Council said that although those engaged in the inappropriate behavior were few and far between, videos of said behavior went viral online.

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Excerpt from phys.org

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Excerpt from www.nytimes.com

New chatbot technology can talk, laugh and sing like a human. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

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Excerpt from dronedj.com

DroneShield has rolled out one of the largest updates to the DroneSentry-C2 command and control counter-drone platform. The update packs in a completely revamped user interface, smarter AI, and more powerful drone detection capabilities.

DroneShield says that the new version 10.0 of DroneSentry-C2 has been rewritten from the ground up, resulting in a faster and smoother experience. Key upgrades include:

• Streamlined user interface: Most noticeable to any existing user will be the modernized look and feel of the DroneSentry-C2 interface. Stripped-back menus allow for faster navigation and clearer access to settings. Operators can now modify key settings without needing to navigate away from the monitoring dashboard. Load times moving between sites and analytics have also been significantly reduced.

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Excerpt from scitechdaily.com

 

A study has uncovered microbial life deep under Chile’s Atacama Desert, indicating that similar subsurface environments on Mars could also harbor life, supported by materials like gypsum. Yungay Playa with typical dry cracks. Credit: Lucas Horstmann, GFZ-Potsdam

In a finding with implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, scientists have uncovered microbial life 13 feet beneath the surface of the Atacama Desert, Earth’s most inhospitable desert. The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is the driest hot desert in the world. Higher life forms are almost entirely absent, but the hyper-arid soil, rich in salts and sulfates, does harbor bacteria.

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Excerpt from techxplore.com

As electric vehicle (EV) demand accelerates, so does the need for lithium batteries. But these batteries contain valuable critical minerals, as well as toxic materials, so they should not be treated as common waste.

Unlike China and some European countries, Australia lacks a dedicated lithium battery recycling facility. Just 10% of Australia’s lithium battery waste was “recycled” in 2021. This means the batteries were collected and shredded locally before being sent overseas for recycling.

Shipping large volumes of spent batteries overseas is complex and risky. Lithium batteries have been known to start fires. A cargo ship laden with lithium batteries caught fire off the coast of Alaska in December 2023. The fire burned for days.