The primary reason hoverboards have become public enemy #1 in recent times is due to their unfortunate tendency to catch fire and explode due to their lithium-ion batteries overheating.
But a new lithium-ion battery developed by scientists in the US could put an end to such dramas. Researchers at Stanford University have made the world’s first lithium-ion battery that shuts off before it overheats, then restarts immediately when its temperature has cooled.
Conventional lithium-ion batteries comprise a pair of electrodes and a liquid or gel electrolyte that carries charged particles between them. However, if the battery’s temperature reaches around 150 degrees Celsius (300 degrees Fahrenheit) as a result of a defect or overcharging, the electrolyte can catch fire and trigger an explosion, as we’ve seen in many sad cases.
Very interesting. Teleporting and it’s potential use is really worth keeping a closer eye on especially with the progresses that we have seen so far with Quantum. Just 2 weeks ago, scientists were able to prove that one atom was able to co-exist in 2 locations during the same point of time.
Many members of the Stanford community came to an event called “Teleportation” last December. The event featured Tongcang Li, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy and assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, who discussed his work in quantum superposition, or having an entity simultaneously exist in two locations.
The event was organized by Anna Chukaeva, a first year student at the Graduate School of Business, and Evgeny Duhovny, a local graphic artist and DJ. The two have begun organizing campus events in conjunction with ArtSoFFT, a local group (not affiliated with Stanford). Driven by a desire to popularize and spread a love of science, the group has begun organizing a series of events at Stanford featuring scientists discussing their work.
Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente research institute MESA+ have discovered a new fundamental property of electrical currents in very small metal circuits. They show how electrons can spread out over the circuit like waves and cause interference effects at places where no electrical current is driven. The geometry of the circuit plays a key role in this so called nonlocal effect. The interference is a direct consequence of the quantum mechanical wave character of electrons and the specific geometry of the circuit. For designers of quantum computers, it is an effect to take account of. The results are published in the British journal Scientific Reports.
Interference is a common phenomenon in nature and occurs when one or more propagating waves interact coherently. Interference of sound, light or water waves is well known, but also the carriers of electrical current — electrons — can interfere. It shows that electrons need to be considered as waves as well, at least in nanoscale circuits at extremely low temperatures: a canonical example of the quantum mechanical wave-particle duality.
DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.
At this point in time, we are at the height of the information age. And computers have had an enormous impact on all of our lives. Any information is able to be represented as a collection of bits. And with Moore’s law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months, our ability to manipulate and store these bits has continued to grow and grow. Moore’s law has been driven by scientists being able to make transistors and integrated circuits continuously smaller and smaller, but there eventually comes a point we reach in which these transistors and integrated circuits cannot be made any smaller than they already are, since some are already at the size of a single atom. This inevitably leads us into the quantum world. Quantum mechanics has rules which are, in many ways, hard for us to truly comprehend, yet are nevertheless tested. Quantum computing looks to make use of these strange rules of quantum physics, and process information in a totally different way. Quantum computing looks to replace the classical bits which are either a 0 or a 1, with quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This ability to be two different things at the same time is referred to as a superposition. 200 qubits hold more bits of information than there are particles in the universe. A useful quantum computer will require thousands or even millions of physical qubits. Anything such as an atom can serve as a quantum bit for making a quantum computer, then you can use a superconducting circuit to build two artificial atoms. So at this point in time we have a few working quantum transistors, but scientists are working on developing the quantum integrated circuit. Quantum error correction is the biggest problem encountered in development of the quantum computer. Quantum computer science is a field that right now is in its very early stages, since scientists have yet been able to develop any quantum hardware.
Since you first started learning about the world, you’ve known that cause leads to effect. Everything that’s ever happened to or near you has reiterated this point, making it seem like a fundamental law of nature. It isn’t.
It is, in fact, possible for an event to occur before its causal factors have manifested or happened. This isn’t how appliances work — you don’t have to worry about will have having left the oven on — but it is how particle physics works. It’s also the key to explaining how time travel, under the laws of quantum physics, could operate.
DARPA funds the Atoms-to-Products program that aims to maintain quantum nanoscale properties at the millimeter scale of microchips.
The main goal of the atoms-to-products program is to create technology and processes needed to create nanometer-scale pieces, with dimensions almost the size of atoms, into components and materials only millimeter scale in size. And to spur developments in the program DARPA has now posed the challenge to 10 laboratories across the nation.
To get the full benefits of nanoscale engineering at the millimeter scale, the organization has partnered with Intelligent Materials Solutions. “Our initial project will be to control infrared light by assembling nanoscale particles into finished components that are one million times larger,” explains Adam Gross, the team leader working closely with Christopher Roper to bring the Atoms-to Products project to fruition.
Two separate research groups, one of which is from MIT, have presented evidence that wormholes — tunnels that may allow us to travel through time and space — are “powered” by quantum entanglement. Furthermore, one of the research groups also postulates the reverse — that quantum entangled particles are connected by miniature wormholes.
A wormhole, or Einstein-Rosen bridge to give its formal name, is a hypothetical feature of spacetime that exists in four dimensions, and somehow connects to another wormhole that’s located elsewhere in both space and time. The theory, essentially, is that a wormhole is a tunnel that isn’t restricted by the normal limitations of 3D Cartesian space and the speed of light, allowing you to travel from one point in space and time, to another point in space and time — theoretically allowing you to traverse huge portions of the universe, and travel in time.
A beam splitter is placed in a quantum superposition state of being both active and inactive allowing the wave and particle aspects of the system to be observed in a single setup.
If a time traveler went back in time and stopped their own grandparents from meeting, would they prevent their own birth?
That’s the crux of an infamous theory known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, which is often said to mean time travel is impossible — but some researchers think otherwise. A group of scientists have simulated how time-travelling photons might behave, suggesting that, at the quantum level, the grandfather paradox could be resolved.
The research was carried out by a team of researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia and their results are published in the journal Nature Communications. The study used photons — single particles of light — to simulate quantum particles travelling back through time. By studying their behavior, the scientists revealed possible bizarre aspects of modern physics.
A research group at Osaka University has succeeded in observing at the intended timing two-phonon quantum interference by using two cold calcium ions in ion traps, which spatially confine charged particles. A phonon is a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating particles within crystals. Two-particle quantum interference experiments using two photons or atoms have been previously reported, but this group’s achievement is the world’s first observation using two phonons.
This group demonstrated that the phonon, a quantum mechanical description of an elementary vibrational motion in matter, and the photon, an elementary particle of light, share common properties. This group’s research results will contribute to quantum information processing research, including quantum simulation using phonons and quantum interface research.
Ion traps are an important technique in physically achieving quantum information processing including quantum computation, and research on ion traps is being carried out all over the world, with Dr. David J. Wineland of the United States, a leading expert in the field, winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2012.
