Lifeboat Foundation

How many Earth-like planets exist throughout the universe? This is what recent talk given at the National Astronomy Meeting 2024 hopes to address as Dr. David Brown, who is a scientist on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission, provided an update on the mission and the goals it hopes to achieve. This comes as PLATO is currently scheduled to launch in December 2026 with the goal of finding Earth-like planets throughout the universe, which could greatly expand our knowledge of exoplanets, as well.

“PLATO’s goal is to search for exoplanets around stars similar to the Sun and at orbital periods long enough for them to be in the habitable zone,” said Dr. Brown. “One of the main mission objectives is to find another Earth-Sun equivalent pair, but it is also designed to carefully and precisely characterize the exoplanets that it finds (i.e. work out their masses, radii, and bulk density).”

Some of the questions touch on x-risks and EA. Enjoy. http://faroutinitoative.com

Vayu is already witnessing significant traction, with as many as 20 enterprises piloting it’s novel technology and over 100 on a waitlist.

Nanotransfection is very useful and could be used as a way to heal oneself on a smartphone in one touch with cell reprogramming and much more like gene transfer.

Tissue nanotransfection (TNT), a cutting-edge technique of in vivo gene therapy, has gained substantial attention in various applications ranging from in vivo tissue reprogramming in regenerative medicine, and wound healing to cancer treatment. This technique harnesses the advancements in the semiconductor processes, facilitating the integration of conventional transdermal gene delivery methods—nanoelectroporation and microneedle technologies. TNT silicon chips have demonstrated considerable promise in reprogramming fibroblast cells of skin in vivo into vascular or neural cells in preclinical studies to assist in the recovery of injured limbs and damaged brain tissue. More recently, the application of TNT chips has been extended to the area of exosomes, which are vital for intracellular communication to track their functionality during the wound healing process.

Fusion vessels have a Goldilocks problem: The plasma within needs to be hot enough to generate net power, but if it’s too hot, it can damage the vessel’s interior. Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are exploring ways to draw away excess heat, including several methods that use liquid metal.

One possibility, say researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy Lab, involves flowing liquid lithium up and down a series of slats in tiles lining the bottom of the vessel. The liquid metal could also help to protect the components that face the plasma against a bombardment of particles known as neutrons.

“The prevailing option for an economical commercial fusion reactor is a compact design,” said PPPL’s Egemen Kolemen, co-author of a 2022 paper on the research and an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. However, compactness makes handling the heat flux and neutron bombardment a bigger challenge.

The challenges posed by solar and wind generators are real. They are inherently variable, producing electricity only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. To ensure reliable energy supplies, grids dominated by renewables need “firming” capacity: back-up technology that can supply electricity on demand.

Some, including the Albanese government, argue gas-fired generators are needed to fill the gap. Others, such as the Coalition, say renewables can’t “keep the lights on” at all and Australia should pursue nuclear energy instead.

But a new way to firm up the world’s electricity grids is fast developing: sodium-ion batteries. This emerging energy storage technology could be a game-changer – enabling our grids to run on 100% renewables.

“Significant effort has been invested over the years to pinpoint the physical cause of the radiation drive-deficit problem,” Chen said. “We are excited about this discovery as it helps resolve a decade-long puzzle in ICF research. Our findings point the way to an improvement in the predictive capabilities of simulations, which is crucial for the success of future fusion experiments.”

In NIF experiments, scientists use a device called a hohlraum—approximately the size of a pencil eraser—to convert laser energy into X-rays, which then compress a fuel capsule to achieve fusion.

For years, there has been a problem where the predicted X-ray energy (drive) was higher than what was measured in experiments. This results in the time of peak neutron production, or “bangtime,” occurring roughly 400 picoseconds too early in simulations. This discrepancy is known as the “drive-deficit” because modelers had to artificially reduce the laser drive in the simulations to match observed bangtime.

Zheng An, Chenfeng Cao, Cheng-Qian Xu, and D. L. Zhou, Quantum 8, 1421 (2024). Identifying phases of matter presents considerable challenges, particularly within the domain of quantum theory, where the complexity of ground states appears to increase exponentially with system size. Quantum many-body systems exhibit an array of complex entanglement structures spanning distinct phases. Although extensive research has explored the relationship between quantum phase transitions and quantum entanglement, establishing a direct, pragmatic connection between them remains a critical challenge. In this work, we present a novel and efficient quantum phase transition classifier, utilizing disentanglement with reinforcement learning-optimized variational quantum circuits. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on quantum phase transitions in the transverse field Ising model (TFIM) and the XXZ model. Moreover, we observe the algorithm’s ability to learn the Kramers-Wannier duality pertaining to entanglement structures in the TFIM. Our approach not only identifies phase transitions based on the performance of the disentangling circuits but also exhibits impressive scalability, facilitating its application in larger and more complex quantum systems. This study sheds light on the characterization of quantum phases through the entanglement structures inherent in quantum many-body systems.

An international research collaboration, including a group from Cornell Engineering, has applied a new X-ray-based reconstruction technique to observe, for the first time, topological defects in a nanoscale self-assembly-based cubic network structure of a polymer-metal composite material imaged over a relatively large sample volume.