Lifeboat Foundation

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four-thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

With that in mind, scientists have unveiled a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

A modern long-range wide-body airliner like the Airbus A350 takes 15 hours of non-stop flying to travel from Los Angeles to Sydney. This makes it one of the longest and most tiring airline routes for passengers. But imagine an aircraft that will reduce travel time between the two cities to just 3 hours. Sounds unrealistic, right? After all, the jet should be capable of flying multiple times the speed of sound to achieve that feat. However, the grandson of aviation giant Bombardier, Charles Bombardier, believes the technology to build such an ambitious aircraft will be available in the foreseeable future. A mechanical engineer by education, Charles leads a nonprofit organization named Imaginactive, which has created multitudes of highly-ambitious, world-changing concepts over the last few years. The Paradoxal hypersonic jet concept is one of them, and it is designed to travel at Mach 24 (nearly 16,000 mph). At this speed, it can fly out of JFK and land at Heathrow, London, covering a distance of 3,450 miles in 11 minutes. Yes, you read that right.

According to its designer, Juan Garcia Mansilla, the development of the Paradoxal concept involved numerous scientists and engineers, including some professionals from NASA. You won’t be wrong if you think the conceptual hypersonic aircraft looks like a futuristic version of the B2 stealth bomber. Both of them are strikingly similar to the peregrine falcon, the world’s fastest bird, during its dive to catch its prey.

Also read — Inspired by the Viking Ships and aptly named ‘Norway’ — This 528-foot long superyacht concept has solar sails, a sky elevator, cinema, supercar garage and even a hospital.

A compact, lightweight sensor system with infrared imaging capabilities developed by an international team of engineers could be easily fitted to a drone for remote crop monitoring.

This flat-optics technology has the potential to replace traditional optical lens applications for environmental sensing in a range of industries.

This innovation could result in cheaper groceries as farmers would be able to pinpoint which crops require irrigation, fertilization and pest control, instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach, thereby potentially boosting their harvests.

A research team led by Director JO Moon-Ho of the Center for Van der Waals Quantum Solids within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has implemented a novel method to achieve epitaxial growth of 1D metallic materials with a width of less than 1 nanometer (nm). The group applied this process to develop a new structure for 2D semiconductor logic circuits. Notably, they used the 1D metals as a gate electrode of the ultra-miniaturized transistor.

This research was published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Integrated 1D epitaxial mirror twin boundaries for ultra-scaled 2D MoS 2 field-effect transistors”).

Integrated devices based on two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors, which exhibit excellent properties even at the ultimate limit of material thickness down to the atomic scale, are a major focus of basic and applied research worldwide. However, realizing such ultra-miniaturized transistor devices that can control the electron movement within a few nanometers, let alone developing the manufacturing process for these integrated circuits, has been met with significant technical challenges.

The advent of quantum computers promises to revolutionize computing by solving complex problems exponentially more rapidly than classical computers. However, today’s quantum computers face challenges such as maintaining stability and transporting quantum information.

Phonons, which are quantized vibrations in periodic lattices, offer new ways to improve these systems by enhancing qubit interactions and providing more reliable information conversion. Phonons also facilitate better communication within quantum computers, allowing the interconnection of them in a network.

Nanophononic materials, which are artificial nanostructures with specific phononic properties, will be essential for next-generation quantum networking and communication devices. However, designing phononic crystals with desired vibration characteristics at the nano-and micro-scales remains challenging.

MD Anderson researchers identify molecule that reduces age-related inflammation and improves brain and muscle function in preclinical models.

MD Anderson News Release June 21, 2024

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have demonstrated that therapeutically restoring…

Continue reading “Activating molecular target reverses multiple hallmarks of aging” »

A team of scientists from the University of Sharjah say they have invented a biosensor capable of detecting the gene mutations responsible for the loss of hearing.

In pausing to think before making an important decision, we may imagine the potential outcomes of different choices we could make. While this “mental simulation” is central to how we plan and make decisions in everyday life, how the brain works to accomplish this is not well understood.

An international team of scientists has now uncovered neural mechanisms used in planning. Its results, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggest that an interplay between the brain’s prefrontal cortex and hippocampus allows us to imagine future outcomes in order to guide our decisions.

“The prefrontal cortex acts as a ‘simulator,’ mentally testing out possible actions using a cognitive map stored in the hippocampus,” explains Marcelo Mattar, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s authors.