Lifeboat Foundation

Advanced materials, including two-dimensional or atomically thin materials just a few atoms thick, are essential for the future of microelectronics technology. Now a team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a way to directly measure such materials’ thermal expansion coefficient, the rate at which the material expands as it heats. That insight can help address heat-related performance issues of materials incorporated into microelectronics, such as computer chips.

The research has been published in ACS Nano (“Direct measurement of the thermal expansion coefficient of epitaxial WSe 2 by four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy”).

“It’s well understood that heating a material usually results in expansion of the atoms arranged in the material’s structure,” said Theresa Kucinski, scientist with the Nuclear Materials Science Group at Los Alamos. “But things get weird when the material is only one to a few atoms thick.”

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has found a new RNA virus that they believe is hitching a ride with a common human parasite.

The virus, called Apocryptovirus odysseus, along with 18 others that are closely related to it, was discovered through a computational screen of human neuron data — an effort aimed at elucidating the connection between RNA viruses and neuroinflammatory disease. The virus is associated with severe inflammation in humans infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, leading the team to hypothesize that it exacerbates toxoplasmosis disease.

“We discovered A. odysseus in human neurons using the open-science Serratus platform to search through more than 150,000 RNA viruses” said Purav Gupta, first author on the study, recent high school graduate and current undergraduate student at U of T’s Donnelly Centre for Cellular and Biomolecular Research. “Serratus identifies RNA viruses from public data by flagging an enzyme called RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, which facilitates replication of viral RNA. This enzyme allows the virus to reproduce itself and for the infection to spread.”

Is this the beginning of the age of bionic humans?

Researchers develop versatile paper-based electronic devices demonstrating both neuromorphic computing capabilities and physically unclonable functions for security applications.

Physicists at TU Graz have determined that certain molecules can be stimulated by pulses of infrared light to generate small magnetic fields. If experimental trials are also successful, this technique could potentially be applied in quantum computer circuits.

When molecules absorb infrared light, they start to vibrate as they receive energy. Andreas Hauser from the Institute of Experimental Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) used this well-understood process as a basis for exploring whether these vibrations could be harnessed to produce magnetic fields. Since atomic nuclei carry a positive charge, the movement of these charged particles results in the creation of a magnetic field.

Using the example of metal phthalocyanines – ring-shaped, planar dye molecules – Andreas Hauser and his team have now calculated that, due to their high symmetry, these molecules actually generate tiny magnetic fields in the nanometre range when infrared pulses act on them.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Texas have developed a prototype for a handheld, chip-based 3D printer using a photonic chip that emits beams of light to cure resin into solid objects. This innovative technology could revolutionize the production of customized, low-cost objects on-the-go and has potential applications in medical and engineering fields.

Portable 3D Printing Technology

Imagine a portable 3D printer you could hold in the palm of your hand. The tiny device could enable a user to rapidly create customized, low-cost objects on the go, like a fastener to repair a wobbly bicycle wheel or a component for a critical medical operation.

Neurotech startup Paradromics is set to commence human trials of its brain implant in 2025, intensifying the competition in the emerging brain-computer interface (BCI) market.

This move positions Paradromics against Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which has been at the forefront of public attention in this domain.

Paradromics’ CEO and founder, Matt Angle, in an interview with CNBC Tech, expressed his enthusiasm about the potential of brain-computer interfaces.

Imagine waking up one day to the realization that everything you’ve ever known—the universe, the stars, your own thoughts—could be nothing more than an elaborate computer simulation crafted by an advanced civilization. This is the audacious, mind-bending premise explored by philosopher Nick Bostrom in “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Through rigorous reasoning and a blend of cutting-edge technology and philosophical inquiry, Bostrom challenges our understanding of reality itself, posing that the odds we are living in a simulated world may be profoundly higher than we ever considered. As you delve into this thought-provoking investigation, you might just find that questioning the nature of your own existence becomes more thrilling—and unsettling—than any work of science fiction.

Magnetization can be switched with a single laser pulse. However, it is not known whether the underlying microscopic process is scalable to the nanometer length scale, a prerequisite for making this technology competitive for future data storage applications. Researchers at the Max Born Institute in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with colleagues at the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales in Madrid, Spain, and the free-electron laser facility FERMI in Trieste, Italy, have determined a fundamental spatial limit for light-driven magnetization reversal.

They report their finsings in Nano Letters (“Exploring the Fundamental Spatial Limits of Magnetic All-Optical Switching”).

Modern magnetic hard drives can store more than one terabit of data per square inch, which means that the smallest unit of information can be encoded on an area smaller than 25 nanometers by 25 nanometers. In laser-based, all-optical switching (AOS), magnetically encoded bits are switched between their “0” and “1” state with a single ultrashort laser pulse. To realize the full potential of AOS, particularly in terms of faster write/erase cycles and improved power efficiency, we thus need to understand whether a magnetic bit can still be all-optically reversed if its size is on the nanoscale.