Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists from Ohio University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the University of Illinois at Chicago used scanning tunneling microscopy to form a charged rare earth molecule on a metal surface and rotate it clockwise and counterclockwise without affecting its charge.

Their findings open up new avenues for research into the atomic-scale manipulation of materials important to the future, ranging from quantum computing.

Continue reading “For the First Time: Scientists Have Formed a Charged Rare Earth Molecule on a Metal Surface and Rotated It” »

Researchers from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering and Fujitsu have developed a new way of searching through ‘chemical space’ for materials with desirable properties.

The technique has resulted in a promising new catalyst material that could help lower the cost of producing clean hydrogen.

The discovery represents an important step toward more sustainable ways of storing energy, including from renewable but intermittent sources, such as solar and wind power.

The most common particles are electrons and photons, which are understood to be examples from the great families of fermions and bosons, to which all other particles in nature belong. But there is another possible category of particles, the so-called anyons. Anyons are predicted to arise inside materials small enough to confine the electronic state wave function, as they emerge from the collective dance of many interacting electrons.

One of these is named Majorana zero mode, anyonic cousins to the Majorana fermions proposed by Ettore Majorana in 1937. Majoranas, as these hypothetical anyons are affectionally called, are predicted to exhibit numerous exotic properties, such as simultaneously behaving like a particle and antiparticle, allowing mutual annihilation, and the capability to hide quantum information by encoding it nonlocally in space. The latter property specifically holds the promise of resilient quantum computing.

Since 2010, many research groups have raced to find Majoranas. Unlike fundamental particles, such as the electron or the photon, which naturally exist in a vacuum, Majorana anyons need to be created inside hybrid materials. One of the most promising platforms for realizing them is based on hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanodevices. Over the past decade, these devices have been studied with excruciating detail, with the hope of unambiguously proving the existence of Majoranas. However, Majoranas are tricky entities, easily overlooked or mistaken with other quantum states.

Many investors are jumping to inject money into the startup.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos-backed foundations (Gates Frontier and Bezos Expeditions) have joined other companies in investing $75 million in Synchron, the endovascular brain-computer interface (BCI) company, according to a press release by the organization published on Thursday. This is a Series C financing round led by ARCH Venture Partners that brings the total amount raised since inception to $145 million.

Many investors on board.

Continue reading “Gates and Bezos back Neuralink-competitor Synchron in a new funding” »

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Other tech companies, such as Microsoft as well as Apple, have attempted to break this dominance but have fallen exceedingly short of user expectations. Even though Google Maps are not 100 percent accurate, it is the best available product out there, and now major technology companies want to take on the beast together.

Water becomes conductive within one trillionth of a second.

Researchers have developed a water-based switch that becomes conductive thousands of times faster than current state-of-art semiconductor-based switches. Such switches are used in computers, smartphones, and wireless communications.

Essentially, a short but powerful laser pulse converts the water into a conductive state within less than a trillionth of a second (10^-12 seconds), during which time it behaves almost like a metal.

Companies are working to avoid a “quantum winter” that could stall progress and freeze startup investments.

Computational modelling of the brain requires accurate representation of the tissues concerned. Mechanical testing has numerous challenges, in particular for low strain rates, like neurosurgery, where redistribution of fluid is biomechanically important. A finite-element (FE) model was generated in FEBio, incorporating a spring element/fluid–structure interaction representation of the pia–arachnoid complex (PAC). The model was loaded to represent gravity in prone and supine positions. Material parameter identification and sensitivity analysis were performed using statistical software, comparing the FE results to human in vivo measurements. Results for the brain Ogden parameters µ, α and k yielded values of 670 Pa, −19 and 148 kPa, supporting values reported in the literature. Values of the order of 1.2 MPa and 7.7 kPa were obtained for stiffness of the pia mater and out-of-plane tensile stiffness of the PAC, respectively. Positional brain shift was found to be non-rigid and largely driven by redistribution of fluid within the tissue. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study using in vivo human data and gravitational loading in order to estimate the material properties of intracranial tissues. This model could now be applied to reduce the impact of positional brain shift in stereotactic neurosurgery.

Finite-element (FE)-based computational models of the human brain are an increasingly common research tool, with applications ranging from head impact to neurosurgery. Studies considering head impacts are generally concerned with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms is essential for the development of prevention measures [1]. Within neurosurgery, efforts are primarily focused on tumour resection, where loss of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and tissue resection are responsible for much of the deformation [2]. Movement and deformation of the intact brain, known as brain shift, is clinically significant in stereotactic neurosurgical procedures such as deep brain stimulation where electrode placement accuracy correlates with patient outcomes [3].

After announcing that it had implanted its brain-computer interface in its first U.S. | After announcing that it had implanted its brain-computer interface in its first U.S. paralysis patient earlier this year, Synchron has raised $75 million to take its mind-reading tech to the next level.