New Information Storage and Processing Device

A team of scientists has developed a means to create a new type of memory, marking a notable breakthrough in the increasingly sophisticated field of artificial intelligence.

“Quantum materials hold great promise for improving the capacities of today’s computers,” explains Andrew Kent, a New York University physicist and one of the senior investigators. “The work draws upon their properties in establishing a new structure for computation.”

The creation, designed in partnership with researchers from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Paris-Saclay, is reported in Scientific Reports.

“Since conventional computing has reached its limits, new computational methods and devices are being developed,” adds Ivan Schuller, a UCSD physicist and one of the...

Read More

Astronomers discover how to Feed a Black Hole

The image shows the process of nuclear feeding of a black hole in the galaxy NGC 1566, and how the dust filaments, which surround the active nucleus, are trapped and rotate in a spiral around the black hole until it swallows them. Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The image shows the process of nuclear feeding of a black hole in the galaxy NGC 1566, and how the dust filaments, which surround the active nucleus, are trapped and rotate in a spiral around the black hole until it swallows them. Credit: ESO.

Researchers have discovered long narrow dust filaments which surround and feed black holes in the centers of galaxies, and which could be the natural cause of the darkening of the centers of many galaxies when their nuclear black holes are active.

The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger than that of our Solar ...

Read More

New Solid Electrolyte promises Cheaper, Better All-Solid-State Lithium Batteries

battery
Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have designed a novel material to make all-solid-state lithium (Li) batteries less costly but more effective, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communicationson July 20.

Solid electrolytes are important to realizing safe, energy-dense all-solid-state Li batteries. Among different types of solid electrolytes, the chloride solid electrolytes were recently found to exhibit the desirable characteristics of both sulfide and oxide systems, including high ionic conductivity, deformability and oxidative stability. The rare combination of these advantages has rapidly attracted wide interest...

Read More

Earthly Rocks point way to Water hidden on Mars

file of slightly red but mostly black hematite on left with pile of much redder hydrohematite on right
Hydrohematite (right) is a brighter red than anhydrous hematite (left).
IMAGE: Si Athena Chen, Penn State

A combination of a once-debunked 19th-century identification of a water-carrying iron mineral and the fact that these rocks are extremely common on Earth, suggests the existence of a substantial water reservoir on Mars, according to a team of geoscientists.

“One of my student’s experiments was to crystalize hematite,” said Peter J. Heaney, professor of geosciences, Penn State. “She came up with an iron-poor compound, so I went to Google Scholar and found two papers from the 1840s where German mineralogists, using wet chemistry, proposed iron-poor versions of hematite that contained water.”

In 1844, Rudolf Hermann named his mineral turgite and in 1847 August Breithaupt named hi...

Read More