Tech
Our lives today are governed by electronics in all shapes and forms. Electronics, in turn, are governed by their batteries. However, the traditional lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), that are widely used in electronic devices, are falling out of favor because researchers are beginning to view lithium metal batteries (LMBs) as a superior alternative due to their remarkably high energy density that exceeds LIBs by an order of magnitude! The key difference lies in the choice of anode material: LIBs use graphite, whereas LMBs use lithium metal.
Tokyo - Machine learning is the process by which computers adapt their responses without human intervention. This form of artificial intelligence (AI) is now common in everyday tools such as virtual assistants and is being developed for use in areas from medicine to agriculture. A challenge posed by the rapid expansion of machine learning is the high energy demand of the complex computing processes.
Magnetic fields are ubiquitous throughout our Milky Way Galaxy and play a crucial role in all dynamics of interstellar medium. However, questions like how Solar-type stars form out of magnetized molecular clouds, whether the role of magnetic fields changes at various scales and densities of molecular clouds, and what factors can change the morphology of magnetic fields in low-mass dense cores still remain unclear.
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology develop a 3D functional interposer--the interface between a chip and the package substrate--containing an embedded capacitor. This compact design saves a lot of package area and greatly reduces the wiring length between the chip's terminals and the capacitor, allowing for less noise and power consumption. Their approach paves the way to new semiconductor package structures with greater miniaturization.
ALS is a very severe neurodegenerative disease in which nerve cells in the spinal cord controlling muscles and movement slowly die. There is no effective treatment and the average life expectancy after being diagnosed with ALS is usually short. Because of this, new knowledge about the disease is urgently needed.
Now, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have gained new insights about ALS, by investigating the early development of the disease in a mouse model.
Methane emissions from North American livestock may be routinely undercounted, a new analysis by researchers at New York University and Johns Hopkins University finds. The work also notes that in developing countries, where animal agriculture is becoming increasingly industrialized, methane emissions could rise more than expected.
These assessments are based on a review, appearing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, of eight existing studies.
June 1, 2021 -- Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and Universidade Federal de Ciências da Saúde de Porto Alegre, Brazil found that when health workers were trained to promote infant healthy feeding practices to pregnant women their children consumed less fats and carbohydrates at 3 years of age and had lower measures of body fat at the age of 6. The study is the first to show that the roots for obesity start in the first year of life, after mothers stop breastfeeding.
Researchers working under the leadership of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have conducted the first precise and comprehensive measurements of sea level rises in the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. A new method now makes it possible to determine sea level changes with millimeter accuracy even in coastal areas and in case of sea ice coverage. This is of vital importance for planning protective measures.
In a joint effort, ct.qmat scientists from Dresden, Rostock, and Würzburg have accomplished non-Hermitian topological states of matter in topolectric circuits. The latter acronym refers to topological and electrical, giving a name to the realization of synthetic topological matter in electric circuit networks. The main motif of topological matter is its role in hosting particularly stable and robust features immune to local perturbations, which might be a pivotal ingredient for future quantum technologies.
In interstellar dust clouds, turbulence must first dissipate before a star can form through gravity. A German-French research team has now discovered that the kinetic energy of the turbulence comes to rest in a space that is very small on cosmic scales, ranging from one to several light-years in extent. The group also arrived at new results in the mathematical method: Previously, the turbulent structure of the interstellar medium was described as self-similar - or fractal.
Neutrons - Space ice, un-Earthly cold
Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory successfully created amorphous ice, similar to ice in interstellar space and on icy worlds in our solar system. They documented that its disordered atomic behavior is unlike any ice on Earth.
Single atomic defect is the smallest structural unit of solid material. The construction of devices based on single defect can reach the limit of miniaturization of semiconductor devices. In the past decades, the creation and manipulation of single defects in semiconductors opened a new research field, and could be used to physically realize "qubits" of solid-state quantum computation through spin or electron charge. Most interest have focused on the studies of spin quantum computing. However, the spin manipulation need an optical and magnetic field.
The discovery of graphene, a 2D layered form of carbon, once caused a paradigm shift in science and technology like no other. As this wonder material drew attention from material scientists around the world, it spurred research on other materials that were structurally similar, such as "van der Waals materials", which comprise strongly-bonded 2D atomic layers that are held together by weak interlayer interactions called "van der Waals forces".
Swedish researchers from institutions including Uppsala University have spent four years gathering data from the areas affected by the major forest fire of 2014. In their study of how the ecosystem as a whole has been altered, they could see that water quality in watercourses quickly returned to normal, while forested areas continued to lose carbon for many years after the fire.
In recent months, more than three hundred cases of salmonellosis have occurred in various European countries and Canada, which are linked to each other. In the UK the cases could be partly traced back to frozen breaded poultry meat. The cause was contamination with the bacterium Salmonella Enteritidis, which causes gastrointestinal inflammation. Salmonella is not killed by deep freezing and can remain infectious at temperatures below zero degrees Celsius.