Science Daily March 9, 2018 Researchers in Japan developed a new methodology to analyze citations in papers that used two specified terms and tracked the changes over time. They mapped individual papers and connected these with papers they had cited, resulting in publications citing the same paper being close to each other. They found that only a few publications were required for the fusion between agent based modeling and individual based modeling and these weren’t necessarily the most cited papers. According to them three things are needed for fusion to occur: researchers being aware of issues in different fields; common […]
Top 10 Science and Technology Innovations for the Week of 3/9/2018
01. Controlled coupling of light and matter 02. How a yeast cell helps crack open the ‘black box’ behind artificial intelligence 03. A Preview of Bristlecone, Google’s New Quantum Processor 04. Sunlight funnel collects light from all directions 05. Planning for smallpox outbreak must consider immunosuppression 06. A treasure trove for nanotechnology experts 07. Broad spectrum antiviral drug inhibits a range of emerging coronaviruses 08. When rotated at a ‘magic angle,’ graphene sheets can form an insulator or a superconductor 09. Personalizing wearable devices 10. New data helps explain recent fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field And others …. Contact lenses […]
Controlled coupling of light and matter
Physorg March 6, 2018 To achieve the reabsorption of a photon at room temperature, an international team of researchers (Germany, UK) used a plasmonic nanoresonator, in the form of an extremely narrow slit in a thin gold layer. They controlled the coupling between the resonator and the quantum emitter by implementing a method that allows them to continuously change the coupling and, to switch it on and off in a precise manner. They hope to be able to controllably manipulate the coupling of the quantum dot and the resonator not only by changing their distance, but also through external stimuli—possibly […]
How a yeast cell helps crack open the ‘black box’ behind artificial intelligence
Physorg March 5, 2018 An international team of researchers (USA – UC San Diego, Israel) developed what they call a “visible” neural network and used it to build DCell, a model of a functioning brewer’s yeast cell, commonly used as a model in basic research. To do this, they amassed all knowledge of cell biology in one place and created a hierarchy of these cellular components. Then they mapped standard machine learning algorithms to this knowledge base. “Learning” is guided only by real-world cellular behaviors and constraints coded from approximately 2,500 known cellular components. The team inputs information about genes […]
New data helps explain recent fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field
Science Daily February 28, 2018 Earth’s dipole magnetic field is presently undergoing a rapid decay. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Rochester, South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe) presents a new magnetic record from sites of southern Africa. The new data provides more evidence that the region may play a unique role in magnetic pole reversals. A major change in the magnetic field would have wide-reaching ramifications – cause electrical grid failures, navigation system malfunctions, and satellite breakdowns, more harmful radiation reaches Earth and trigger an increase in the incidence of skin cancer… read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Personalizing wearable devices
Harvard University February 28, 2018 Researchers at Harvard University used Bayesian optimization to identify the peak and offset timing of hip extension assistance that minimizes the energy expenditure of walking with a textile-based wearable device. Optimal peak and offset timing represents an improvement of more than 60% on metabolic reduction compared with state-of-the-art devices that only assist hip extension. The results provide evidence for participant-specific metabolic distributions with respect to peak and offset timing and metabolic landscapes, lending support to the hypothesis that individualized control strategies can offer substantial benefits over fixed control strategies… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE Harvard researchers […]
Planning for smallpox outbreak must consider immunosuppression
Science Daily March 3, 2018 Researchers in Canada published a step by step method to create a pox virus in a lab, making the threat of smallpox re-emergence even greater which highlights the real risk of smallpox re-emerging in the world. An international team of researchers (USA – Arizona State University, Emory University, Australia) reveals that the number of people living with weakened immune systems must be examined when planning for the real risk of smallpox re-emerging in the world and unprecedented levels of immunosuppression in countries like Australia and the US must be considered in planning for the real […]
A Preview of Bristlecone, Google’s New Quantum Processor
Google Research Blog March 5, 2018 The guiding design principle for this device is to preserve the underlying physics of our previous 9-qubit linear array technology, which demonstrated low error rates for readout (1%), single-qubit gates (0.1%) and most importantly two-qubit gates (0.6%) as their best result. This device uses the same scheme for coupling, control, and readout, but is scaled to a square array of 72 qubits. They chose a device of this size to be able to demonstrate quantum supremacy in the future, investigate first and second order error-correction using the surface code, and to facilitate quantum algorithm […]
Sunlight funnel collects light from all directions
Physorg March 1, 2018 Researchers in Germany modeled the new light-harvesting funnels on nature’s design. The devices consist of many randomly oriented “donor” pigments that can absorb light from nearly all incident angles and funnel it onto a smaller number of “acceptor” molecules that are all oriented in a single direction to direct the light onto a photoconversion device. This concept can reduce the intrinsic losses of previous solar concentrators to below 10%. In tests the solar concentrator absorbed approximately 99% of the incident light, with minimal losses due to reabsorption and reflection. The device also has a light redirection […]
A treasure trove for nanotechnology experts
Eurekalert March 6, 2018 Starting from 108,423 unique, experimentally known 3D compounds, an international team of researchers (Switzerland, Lithuania) has identified a subset of 5,619 compounds that appear layered according to robust geometric and bonding criteria. Out of those 1,825 compounds are either easily or potentially exfoliable. For a subset of 258 compounds, they explored vibrational, electronic, magnetic and topological properties, identifying 56 ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic systems, including half-metals and half-semiconductors. The research paves the way for groundbreaking technological applications… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE