How you Charge your Mobile Phone could Compromise its Battery Lifespan

Schematic illustration of the sources of energy loss (inefficiency) and heat generation during inductive charging.

Researchers at WMG at the University of Warwick have found that use of inductive charging, whilst highly convenient, risks depleting the life of mobile phones using typical LIBs (Lithium-ion batteries).

Consumers and manufacturers have ramped up their interest in this convenient charging technology, abandoning fiddling with plugs and cables in a favour of just setting the phone directly on a charging base.

Standardisation of charging stations, and inclusion of inductive charging coils in many new smartphones has led to rapidly increasing adoption of the technology...

Read More

The first AI Universe Sim is Fast and Accurate and its creators don’t know how it works

A comparison of the accuracy of two models of the universe. The new model (left), dubbed D3M, is both faster and more accurate than an existing method (right) called second-order perturbation theory, or 2LPT. The colors represent the average displacement error in millions of light-years for each point in the grid relative to a high-accuracy (though much slower) model. S. He et al./Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2019

For the first time, astrophysicists have used artificial intelligence techniques to generate complex 3D simulations of the universe. The results are so fast, accurate and robust that even the creators aren’t sure how it all works...

Read More

New Knowledge on the Development of Asthma

Single-Cell RNA Sequencing of the T Helper Cell Response to House Dust Mites Defines a Distinct Gene Expression Signature in Airway Th2 Cells

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have studied which genes are expressed in overactive immune cells in mice with asthma-like inflammation of the airways. Their results, which are published in the journal Immunity, suggest that the synthesis and breakdown of fats plays an important part in the process.

In asthma, the immune system is overactive, causing inflammation in the lungs and symptoms such as coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. The Th2 cell plays a vital part in asthma-related inflammation, but the rarity of these cells and a lack of sensitivity technology has made these cells hard to study in any detail.

Resear...

Read More

Research reveals Exotic Quantum States in Double-layer Graphene

A new type of quasiparticle is discovered in graphene double-layer structure. This so-called composite fermion consists of one electron and two different types of magnetic flux, illustrated as blue and gold colored arrows in the figure. Composite fermions are capable of forming pairs, such unique interaction leads to experimental discovery of unexpected new quantum Hall phenomena.

Researchers from Brown and Columbia Universities have demonstrated previously unknown states of matter that arise in double-layer stacks of graphene, a 2D nanomaterial. These new states, known as the fractional quantum Hall effect, arise from the complex interactions of electrons both within and across graphene layers.

“The findings show that stacking 2D materials together in close proximity generates en...

Read More