Lifeboat Foundation

Another part of that wariness arises because, to date, no one has independently reproduced Dias’ team’s results. This lack of verification was raised by Jorge Hirsch of the University of California, San Diego, in the last talk of the session in which Dias and his team spoke. Hirsch argued that those claiming to have created high-temperature superconducting hydrides suffered from “confirmation bias,” cherry-picking evidence to support their agenda. (Hirsch has been an outspoken critic of Dias’ work.) As the last question of the session, Dias asked Hirsch, “Could you also have confirmation bias?” “Maybe,” Hirsch replied.

After the session, a few attending researchers—all collaborators of Dias—spoke with Physics Magazine, telling us that they disagreed with Hirsch’s cherry-picking conclusion. One of them, Russell Hemley of the University of Illinois Chicago confirmed Pasan’s claim that they have replicated the 2020 carbonaceous sulfur hydride—as reported in an arXiv paper that the team recently posted [3].

Dias’ group still needs to more precisely characterize NLH’s chemical composition, Pasan said. The samples also appear to consist of two phases, an observation that they need to investigate. Ultimately, they plan to innovate upon this material to create a superconductor at ambient pressure and temperature conditions, a goal that Pasan said he thinks is feasible. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the community has much of the latter still to gather.

Did peptides precede life on Earth? Should we be looking for their biosignatures on Mars?

If you think of DNA in correspondence terms, it writes instructions. RNA picks up the instructions and delivers them to a recipient in the cell. The instructions contain a recipe and what follows is the filling of it producing a protein molecule explicitly designed for the required task.

But before all of the above ever could have happened there had to be something with simpler chemistry. A research team at Rutgers University believes that what first emerged was probably a peptide containing the element nickel. They have named it Nickelback, not to be confused with a Canadian rock band of the same name. This Nickelback peptide consists of two bound nickel atoms which exhibit both stability and activity in terms of reacting with surrounding chemistry. Such a peptide is capable of redox reactions that transfer electrons from one chemical substance to another and is essential as the first stage on the way to life.

Continue reading “How Life First Started Here On Earth With A Peptide” »

Perhaps, human consciousness can be fully understood one day.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins and Cambridge universities have created the first-ever map of the wiring patterns of every neuron in the fruit fly larval brain.

Neurons in an organism’s nervous system, including the brain, are linked to one another by synapses.

Continue reading “Scientists create first detailed map of insect brain with 3,016 neurons” »

HydrogenPro.

HydrogenPro’s electrolyzer will be assembled and installed in the coming weeks, according to a press release published by Chemical Engineering on Wednesday.

A team of Rutgers scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism—a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth—has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life.

The research, published in Science Advances, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial life because it gives researchers a new clue to look for, said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers.

Based on laboratory studies, Rutgers scientists say one of the most likely chemical candidates that kickstarted life was a simple peptide with two nickel atoms they are calling “Nickelback” not because it has anything to do with the Canadian rock band, but because its backbone nitrogen atoms bond two critical nickel atoms. A peptide is a constituent of a protein made up of a few elemental building blocks known as amino acids.

Researchers have developed a new model inspired by recent biological discoveries that shows enhanced memory performance. This was achieved by modifying a classical neural network.

Computer models play a crucial role in investigating the brain’s process of making and retaining memories and other intricate information. However, constructing such models is a delicate task. The intricate interplay of electrical and biochemical signals, as well as the web of connections between neurons and other cell types, creates the infrastructure for memories to be formed. Despite this, encoding the complex biology of the brain into a computer model for further study has proven to be a difficult task due to the limited understanding of the underlying biology of the brain.

Researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have made improvements to a widely utilized computer model of memory, known as a Hopfield network, by incorporating insights from biology. The alteration has resulted in a network that not only better mirrors the way neurons and other cells are connected in the brain, but also has the capacity to store significantly more memories.

Kinetic batteries are not your traditional chemical-based storage solutions.

Alternatives to chemical batteries can help fill the power generation drops caused by a grid largely using solar and wind sources.

In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit (20.5 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

Continue reading “Viable superconducting material created at low temperature and low pressure” »

Companies could one day make superconductive quantum computer chips that function at room temperature thanks to a new material from researchers in the US. Ranga Dias from the University of Rochester and colleagues made a material superconductive at 21°C and pressures less than 1% of those used for existing high-temperature superconductors. ‘The most exciting part is the pressure,’ Dias tells Chemistry World. ‘Even I didn’t think this was possible.’

Together with Ashkan Salamat’s team at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the scientists say that electrical resistance in their nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride falls to zero at room temperature. Making room-temperature zero-resistance materials is a chemistry ‘holy grail’ and could fight climate change by reducing the 5% of electricity lost as heat while flowing through the grid.

However, Dias and Salamat’s team hasn’t been able to fully confirm the new material’s structure. As hydrogen atoms are so small they don’t easily diffract the x-rays used to work out the material’s composition. And this is an important reservation, considering the publisher of the team’s previous high-temperature superconductor paper retracted it.