Lifeboat Foundation

The dust is settling on the Red Planet. Is the remaining Mars Exploration Rover about to rise and shine after three months of slumber? MER Project Manager John Callas returns with a realistic yet hopeful assessment. He also tells us what Opportunity will be asked to do after we hear from her. Planetary Society Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla returns with a preview of China’s next two missions to the Moon, one of which will make the first-ever farside landing. How close is the nearest black hole? We’ll get the answer as Bruce and Mat explore the night sky in this week’s What’s Up.

Researchers are paving the way to total reliance on renewable energy as they study both large- and small-scale ways to replace fossil fuels. One promising avenue is converting simple chemicals into valuable ones using renewable electricity, including processes such as carbon dioxide reduction or water splitting. But to scale these processes up for widespread use, we need to discover new electrocatalysts—substances that increase the rate of an electrochemical reaction that occurs on an electrode surface. To do so, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are looking to new methods to accelerate the discovery process: machine learning.

Zack Ulissi, an assistant professor of chemical engineering (ChemE), and his group are using machine learning to guide electrocatalyst discovery. By hand, researchers spend hours doing routine calculations on materials that may not end up working. Ulissi’s team has created a system that automates these routine calculations, explores a large search space, and suggests new alloys that have promising properties for electrocatalysis.

Continue reading “Accelerating electrocatalyst discovery with machine learning” »

Patients want to see their medical information. Researchers want to share their data.

Now, scientists at Scripps Research have released a new technology designed to make these measurements easier to perform and more accessible to practitioners, scientists and the general public.

“This is really about data sharing and accelerating the process of discovery,” says Gary Siuzdak, Ph.D., professor at Scripps Research and co-corresponding author of the new XCMS/METLIN open data analysis platform, published recently in Nature Methods.

Continue reading “Scientists design new metabolic technology to open scientific data for everyone” »

A tiny laser comprising an array of nanoscale semiconductor cylinders (see image) has been made by an all-A*STAR team. This is the first time that lasing has been achieved in non-metallic nanostructures, and it promises to lead to miniature lasers usable in a wide range of optoelectronic devices.

Microscale lasers are widely used in devices such as CD and DVD players. Now, optical engineers are developing nanoscale lasers—so small that they cannot be seen by the human eye.

A promising method is to use arrays of tiny structures made from semiconductors with a high refractive index. Such structures act as tiny antennas, resonating at specific wavelengths. However, it has been challenging to use them to construct a cavity—the heart of a laser, where light bounces around while being amplified.

Continue reading “An ultracompact laser has been made using nanoscale semiconductor columns” »

An international team of researchers led by The Australian National University (ANU) has invented a tiny camera lens, which may lead to a device that links quantum computers to an optical fibre network.

Quantum computers promise a new era in ultra-secure networks, artificial intelligence and therapeutic drugs, and will be able to solve certain problems much faster than today’s computers.

The unconventional lens, which is 100 times thinner than a human hair, could enable a fast and reliable transfer of quantum information from the new-age computers to a network, once these technologies are fully realised.

Grammarly announced that it will now work on Google Docs through a browser extension. The artificial intelligence-powered grammar checking tool joins Google’s native A.I.-powered tool to help improve both individual and collaborative writing efforts on Google Docs.

Your body’s internal clock, or the circadian rhythm, regular when you sleep and wake, when you’re hungry, and when you’re most productive. Because of its effect on so much of our lives, it also has an enormous impact on our health, so sleep experts have designed a blood test to signal when your body is out of sync.

We haven’t seen SpaceX’s BFR — the rocket that it hopes will enable trips around the world, to the Moon, and, eventually, to Mars — actually take flight yet, but the company says it has already booked a private passenger for a trip around the Moon. No one has been there since Apollo missions ended in the 70s, but now, in a “world’s first” SpaceX is apparently taking reservations. Details like who is going and “why” are to be revealed during a livestream on Monday September 17th at 9 PM ET.

MIT professor Dina Katabi is building a gadget that can sit in one spot and track everything from breathing to walking, no wearables required.