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Kenya has announced that the precious coltan mineral, which is used in the manufacture of cell phones, laptops and other communication gadgets has been found in the country.

Mining and Blue Economy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Salim Mvurya said on Wednesday that adequate deposits of coltan have been found in six counties.

The rare metallic mineral, mostly found in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is mainly used for the production of electronic goods of mass consumption, such as mobile phones, laptops and videogame consoles, and its discovery in Kenya is set to raise the country’s profile as a mineral exporter.

Tunneling is one of most fundamental processes in quantum mechanics, where the wave packet could traverse a classically insurmountable energy barrier with a certain probability.

On the atomic scale, tunneling effects play an important role in molecular biology, such as accelerating enzyme catalysis, prompting spontaneous mutations in DNA and triggering olfactory signaling cascades.

Photoelectron tunneling is a key process in light-induced chemical reactions, charge and energy transfer and radiation emission. The size of optoelectronic chips and other devices has been close to the sub-nanometer atomic scale, and the quantum tunneling effects between different channels would be significantly enhanced.

Add a dash of creamer to your morning coffee, and clouds of white liquid will swirl around your cup. But give it a few seconds, and those swirls will disappear, leaving you with an ordinary mug of brown liquid.

Something similar happens in quantum computer chips—devices that tap into the strange properties of the universe at its smallest scales—where information can quickly jumble up, limiting the memory capabilities of these tools.

That doesn’t have to be the case, said Rahul Nandkishore, associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scientists and engineers have been pushing for the past decade to leverage an elusive ferroelectric material called hafnium oxide, or hafnia, to usher in the next generation of computing memory.

Scientists outline new processes for leveraging the ferroelectric features of hafnia with the aim of enhancing high-performance computing.

Explore life sciences with Wolfram Language Demonstrations, Function Repository, Q&As, Community posts and more, at any skill level. Research computational biology and find your computational X.

According to a leak, Arrow Lake-S processors will not increase core count but will require a new chipset.

Light can behave in strange ways when it interacts with materials. For example, in a photonic material that consists of periodic arrangements of nanoscale optical cavities, light can slow to a crawl or even stop altogether. Theorists have explained this phenomenon for some of these photonic “metacrystals” using the simplifying assumption that the light in each cavity interacts only with the light in its nearest neighbor cavities. But recent observations of photonic metacrystals with larger unit cells suggest that longer-range interactions should also be considered. Now Thanh Xuan Hoang at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore and collaborators have theoretically confirmed the importance of long-range interactions for slowing or stopping light in a one-dimensional photonic metacrystal [1]. The team says that the finding could be used to help researchers design nanoparticle arrays for analog image processing and optical computing.

For their study, Hoang and his collaborators modeled the light–matter interactions within a row of identical dielectric nanoparticles whose diameters were similar to the wavelength of the light. Such a system is relatively tractable with precise solutions, making it a useful tool for investigating the long-range effects hinted at by recent experiments.

When the researchers extended their one-dimensional system to hundreds of nanoparticles, they found that they could collectively excite the particles by oscillating a nearby electric dipole. The resulting system displayed a resonant state that slowed a specific wavelength of light. This outcome occurred only when long-range interactions between particles were permitted. Hoang likens the dipolar emitter to the conductor of an orchestra and the particles to musicians. The nanoparticles harmonize under the conductor’s direction to create a cohesive piece, he says.

Apple’s Vision Pro launch resembles its Apple Watch debut in more ways than one, but to me the most telling similarity is in the marketing approach. Apple has striven to distance the Vision Pro from the existing crop of virtual reality (and even mixed reality) devices — many of which are objective failures — by exclusively focusing on the term “spatial computing”; however, the marketing seems focused on identifying a few key use cases it thinks will best drive consumer interest.

The company took the same approach with the Apple Watch, which like its face computer cousin, was more or less a solution in search of a problem when it originally debuted. Apple initially focused on a lot of features the Apple Watch has now actually done away with entirely, including its Digital Touch stuff that was meant to be a new paradigm for quickly communicating with friends and loved ones across distances. In general, it was presented as a relatively robust and full-featured platform nearly on par with the iPhone in terms of future potential.

The intervening years and generations of Apple Watch have seen it grow considerably in terms of pure technical capability and specifications, yet the marketing and focus around the product from Apple’s side has been more economical, spending outsized effort at the areas that seemed to resonate best with users — including health and wellness, and more recently, safety.

The ‘ten electron’ rule provides guidance for the design of single-atom alloy catalysts for targeted chemical reactions.

A collaborative team across four universities have discovered a very simple rule to design single-atom alloy catalysts for chemical reactions. The ‘ten electron rule’ helps scientists identify promising catalysts for their experiments very rapidly. Instead of extensive trial and error experiments of computationally demanding computer simulations, catalysts’ composition can be proposed simply by looking at the periodic table.

Single-atom alloys are a class of catalysts made of two metals: a few atoms of reactive metal, called the dopant, are diluted in an inert metal (copper, silver, or gold). This recent technology is extremely efficient at speeding up chemical reactions but traditional models don’t explain how they work.