Squeaky, cloudy or spherical—electron orbitals show where and how electrons move around atomic nuclei and molecules. In modern chemistry and physics, they have proven to be a useful model for quantum mechanical description and prediction of chemical reactions. Only if the orbitals match in space and energy can they be combined—this is what happens when two substances react with each other chemically. In addition, there is another condition that must be met, as researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich and the University of Graz have now discovered: The course of chemical reactions also appears to be dependent on the orbital distribution in momentum space. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Chemical reactions are ultimately nothing more than the formation and breakdown of electron bonds, which can also be described as orbitals. The so-called molecular orbital theory thus makes it possible to predict the path of chemical reactions. Chemists Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann received the Nobel Prize in 1981 for greatly simplifying the method, which led to its widespread use and application.
“Usually, the energy and location of electrons are analyzed. However, using the photoemission tomography method, we looked at the momentum distribution of the orbitals,” explains Dr. Serguei Soubatch. Together with his colleagues at the Peter Grünberg Institute (PGI-3) in Jülich and the University of Graz in Austria, he adsorbed various types of molecules on metal surfaces in a series of experiments and mapped the measured momentum in the so-called momentum space.
Now, as a new generation of nuclear reactor designers develop advanced molten salt reactor concepts as an alternative for providing reliable, sustainable, carbon-free power, the need for radiation chemistry has never been greater.
To meet that need, Idaho National Laboratory’s Center for Radiation Chemistry Research has developed a capability that supports the nuclear energy industry by researching radiation-induced effects in advanced reactors, fuels, coolants, materials and fuel recycling technologies while also training the next generation of radiation chemists.
In recent years, electronics and chemical engineers have devised different chemical doping techniques to control the sign and concentration of charge carriers in different material samples. Chemical doping methods essentially entail introducing impurities into materials or substances to change their electrical properties.
These promising methods have been successfully applied on several materials including van der Waals (vdW) materials. VdW materials are structures characterized by strongly bonded 2D layers, which are bound in the third dimension through weaker dispersion forces.
Researchers at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute, Beijing Institute of Technology, Shenzhen University, Tsinghua University recently introduced a new tunable and reversible approach to chemically dope graphene. Their approach, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, is based on laser-assisted chlorination.
Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life.
Dr. Joscha Bach is VP of Research at AI Foundation and Author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, focused on how our minds work, and how to build machines that can perceive, think, and learn.
SHOW NOTES 📝 0:00 Open. 0:17 Hello & welcome. 0:37 Dr. Joscha Bach bio and introduction. 0:56 “It’s an insane world; an amazing time to be alive“ 3:46 Conversation on the S-curve; current instability based on not handling aftermath of collapse of Industrial Revolution society with the advent of the Internet. 8:22 “Either kids or long-term civilization”; carbon sequestration involves not burning any carbon at all. 10:08 Organizing principles conflict with systems bent on infinite growth. 14:30 More on Dr. Bach at Cambridge; entrepreneurial journey leads to MIT and then AI Foundation. 16:23 Relationship between the physical world and our minds; pattern generation; types of computers. 18:10 Mathematics vs. Computation. 19:20 Accidental question-Dr. Bach’s thoughts on psychedelics. 20:27 Turing, “something is true if you can prove it“ 23:14 Quantum computing discussion; Minecraft CPU example; “is our universe efficiently implemented or inefficiently implemented?“ 23:50 Relationship between mind and universe; observational interface. 27:28 Materialism and idealism may complement each other. 29:08 Dream space neural architecture; “you and me are characters in a multimedia novel being authored by the brain”; the collective is part of your dream. 31:51 Necessity of ability to change the way you perceive vs. changing a physical world; perception upgrade is really a will or desire upgrade. 34:12 What is a model? Perspectives of variables and their relationship; probabilities. 35:58 Model convergence to truth aided by probabilities; motivations guide preferences. 38:00 People are born with ideas and then acquire preferences; motivation is how you regulate and push against reality; feedback loop from brain regulating body, awareness and unawareness of loops. 41:28 Needs don’t form a hierarchy; they coexist and compete. 43:00 “the shape of your soul is the hierarchy of your purposes“ 45:26 Neurons; dopamine and other brain chemicals speak many languages; “neurons get fed if you regulate what you want to regulate“ 48:50 Social interaction and brain chemistry; neurons work through pattern recognition, then patterns in the patterns. 51:43 Auditory (and all) senses build layers until we get a unified model of the world/universe. 53:24 Question-who’s in charge of the super-intelligence; single mind; which kind of system; sane/insane implementation. 59:50 Precepts; spatial intelligence; pattern to perception to worldview; intentional self. 1:02:36 Self controls simulations in the brain; “only a simulation can be conscious“ 1:05:05 “The reason why you perceive the world as meaningful is because it’s generated in your mind to model your meaning.“ 1:07:10 Everything you can perceive is generated by your mind; model of architecture. 1:11:45 Use of the DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex); “hippocampus has a script”; neurons individually not that important, somewhat interchangeable, just a signal processor. 1:14:52 “Are we individually intelligent?” Not generally so; generations of specialized people talked to each other; rebuilding efforts usually get foundations wrong; “it’s hard to wake a sleeping person; it’s impossible to wake a person pretending to sleep“ 1:17:52 “The family of good people” is a human condition; morals need to guide our decisions but not our model-making. 1:19:00 Human-centric social media; scientists and philosophers are mostly confused people, humble but without answers; Dunning-Kruger Effect. 1:20:40 More on social media; understanding the nature of reality; “which way can I be useful to other people?”; why are we drawn to things that don’t have utility, like politics on current social media. 1:24:20 Social media done right are individual thoughts in the same mind, “Gaia doesn’t exist but it would be very useful to have one”; endgame of social media is a global brain. 1:26:15 Current society optimized for short games; “tumors“ 1:29:02 Lebowski Theorem — “No super-intelligent system is going to do anything that is harder than hacking its own reward function“ 1:31:12 “Imagine you build an AI that is way smarter, why SHOULD it serve us?“ 1:32:20 “Maybe our motivational function is wrapped up in a big ball of stupid so we don’t debug it;” opting out of reality; how can we balance super-intelligence, will, and evolution or conditions of existence. 1:34:08 Philosophical remarks; reiteration that things are just happening, making it very difficult to predict outcomes; there isn’t a running simulation of a better society so it’s difficult to make changes. 1:36:15 Life is about cells, and cells are very rare. 1:38:08 Would have to be a larger, more imperceptible pattern around us and how would we know; Minecraft example.
Check out the physics courses that I mentioned (many of which are free!) and support this channel by going to https://brilliant.org/Sabine/ where you can create your Brilliant account. The first 200 will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.
In this video I explain how the argument that the universe is finetuned for life works, why it’s wrong, how the mistake happens, and what that means for the existence of god and the multiverse.
Mathematical derivations have unveiled a chaotic, memristor-based circuit in which different oscillating phases can co-exist along six possible lines.
Unlike ordinary electronic circuits, chaotic circuits can produce oscillating electrical signals that never repeat over time—but nonetheless, display underlying mathematical patterns. To expand the potential applications of these circuits, previous studies have designed systems in which multiple oscillating phases can co-exist along mathematically-defined “lines of equilibrium.” In new research published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics, a team led by Janarthanan Ramadoss at the Chennai Institute of Technology, India, designed a chaotic circuit with six distinct lines of equilibrium—more than have ever been demonstrated previously.
Chaotic systems are now widely studied across a broad range of fields: from biology and chemistry, to engineering and economics. If the team’s circuit is realized experimentally, it could provide researchers with unprecedented opportunities to study these systems experimentally. More practically, their design could be used for applications including robotic motion control, secure password generation, and new developments in the Internet of Things—through which networks of everyday objects can gather and share data.
“We don’t need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said UCSC Professor Scott Oliver, describing a new aluminum-gallium nanoparticle powder that generates H2 when placed in water – even seawater.
Aluminum by itself rapidly oxidizes in water, stripping the O out of H2O and releasing hydrogen as a byproduct. This is a short-lived reaction though, because in most cases the metal quickly attains a microscopically thin coating of aluminum oxide that seals it off and puts an end to the fun.
But chemistry researchers at UC Santa Cruz say they’ve found a cost-effective way to keep the ball rolling. Gallium has long been known to remove the aluminum oxide coating and keep the aluminum in contact with water to continue the reaction, but previous research had found that aluminum-heavy combinations had a limited effect.
A new study has found that “diamond rain,” a long-hypothesized exotic type of precipitation on ice giant planets, could be more common than previously thought.
Investigating this process in a new material that more closely resembles the chemical makeup of Neptune and Uranus, scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and their colleagues discovered that the presence of oxygen makes diamond formation more likely, allowing them to form and grow at a wider range of conditions and throughout more planets.
