Engineers solve a mystery on the path to smaller, lighter batteries

A discovery by MIT researchers could finally unlock the door to the design of a new kind of rechargeable lithium battery that is more lightweight, compact, and safe than current versions, and that has been pursued by labs around the world for years.

The key to this potential leap in battery technology is replacing the liquid electrolyte that sits between the positive and negative electrodes with a much thinner, lighter layer of solid ceramic material, and replacing one of the electrodes with solid lithium metal. This would greatly reduce the overall size and weight of the battery and remove the safety risk associated with liquid electrolytes, which are flammable. But that quest has been beset with one big problem: dendrites.

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Solving brain dynamics gives rise to flexible machine-learning models

Last year, MIT researchers announced that they had built "liquid" neural networks, inspired by the brains of small species: a class of flexible, robust machine learning models that learn on the job and can adapt to changing conditions, for real-world safety-critical tasks, like driving and flying. The flexibility of these "liquid" neural nets meant boosting the bloodline to our connected world, yielding better decision-making for many tasks involving time-series data, such as brain and heart monitoring, weather forecasting, and stock pricing.

But these models become computationally expensive as their number of neurons and synapses increase and require clunky computer programs to solve their underlying, complicated math. And all of this math, similar to many physical phenomena, becomes harder to solve with size, meaning computing lots of small steps to arrive at a solution.

Now, the same team of scientists has discovered a way to alleviate this bottleneck...

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NASA Awards SpaceX Second Contract Option for Artemis Moon Landing

“Returning astronauts to the Moon to learn, live, and work is a bold endeavor. With multiple planned landers, from SpaceX and future partners, NASA will be better positioned to accomplish the missions of tomorrow: conducting more science on the surface of the Moon than ever before and preparing for crewed missions to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

“Continuing our collaborative efforts with SpaceX through Option B furthers our resilient plans for regular crewed transportation to the lunar surface and establishing a long-term human presence under Artemis,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, manager for the Human Landing System.

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Earth now weighs six ronnagrams: New metric prefixes voted in

A yottabyte is a one followed by 24 zeroes.

But even the mighty yotta is not enough to handle the world's voracious appetite for data, according to Richard Brown, the head of metrology at the UK's National Physical Laboratory.

"In terms of expressing data in yottabytes, which is the highest prefix currently, we're very close to the limit," Brown told AFP...

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The Cause of Alzheimer's Could Be Coming From Inside Your Mouth

In recent years, a growing number of scientific studies have backed an alarming hypothesis: Alzheimer's disease isn't just a disease, it's an infection.

While the exact mechanisms of this infection are something researchers are still trying to isolate, numerous studies suggest the deadly spread of Alzheimer's goes way beyond what we used to think.

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James Webb Space Telescope reveals an exoplanet atmosphere as never seen before

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just scored another first: a detailed molecular and chemical portrait of a distant world's skies.

The telescope's array of highly sensitive instruments was trained on the atmosphere of a "hot Saturn"—a planet about as massive as Saturn orbiting a star some 700 light-years away—known as WASP-39 b. While JWST and other space telescopes, including Hubble and Spitzer, have previously revealed isolated ingredients of this broiling planet's atmosphere, the new readings provide a full menu of atoms, molecules, and even signs of active chemistry and clouds...

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Rapidly Melting Glaciers Are Releasing a Staggering Payload of Unknown Bacteria

Fast-melting glaciers are releasing staggering amounts of bacteria into rivers and streams, which could transform icy ecosystems, scientists warn.

In a study of glacial runoff from 10 sites across the Northern Hemisphere, researchers have estimated that continued global warming over the next 80 years could release hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria into environments downstream of receding glaciers.

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Ultra-high-resolution MRI reveals migraine brain changes

For the first time, a new study has identified enlarged perivascular spaces in the brains of migraine sufferers.

"In people with chronic migraine and episodic migraine without aura, there are significant changes in the perivascular spaces of a brain region called the centrum semiovale," said study co-author Wilson Xu. "These changes have never been reported before."

"Studying how they contribute to migraine could help us better understand the complexities of how migraines occur."

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We Just Got The Most Detailed View of an Exoplanet Atmosphere Yet – And It's Active

WASP-39b, a gas giant about 700 light-years away, is turning out to be quite the exoplanetary treasure.

Earlier this year, WASP-39b was the subject of the first-ever detection of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the Solar System.

Now, an in-depth analysis of data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has given us an absolute goldmine of information: the most detailed look at an exoplanet atmosphere yet...

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The Science Behind Why You Sprain Your Ankle So Often, And What You Can Do About It

Are you one of those people who seems to be forever spraining their ankle?

To some extent, ankle sprains are part and parcel of being active.

But if it's happening again and again, here's what may be going on – and how you can reduce your risk of recurrent ankle sprain.

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A scalable quantum memory with a lifetime over 2 seconds and integrated error detection

Quantum memory devices can store data as quantum states instead of binary states, as classical computer memories do. While some existing quantum memory technologies have achieved highly promising results, several challenges will need to be overcome before they can be implemented on a large scale.

Researchers at the AWS Center for Quantum Networking and Harvard University have recently developed a promising quantum memory capable of error detection and with a lifetime or coherence time (i.e., the time for which a quantum memory can hold a superposition without collapsing) exceeding 2 seconds. This memory, presented in a paper in Science, could pave the way towards the creation of scalable quantum networks.

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A 'Wormhole' Built on a Quantum Computer Teleported Information as Predicted

For the first time, scientists have created a quantum computing experiment for studying the dynamics of wormholes – that is, shortcuts through spacetime that could get around relativity's cosmic speed limits.

"We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole, yet is sufficiently small to implement on today's quantum hardware," said Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu.

Don't pack your bags for Alpha Centauri just yet: This wormhole simulation is nothing more than a simulation, analogous to a computer-generated black hole or supernova.

And physicists still don't see any conditions under which a traversable wormhole could actually be created. Someone would have to create negative energy first.

Columbia theoretical physicist Peter Woit warned against making too much of a to-do over the research.

"The claim that 'Physicists Create a Wormhole' is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general," he wrote on his blog.

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Short term memory problems can be improved with laser therapy, according to new study

Laser light therapy has been shown to be effective in improving short term memory in a study published in Science Advances.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and Beijing Normal University in China, demonstrated that the therapy, which is non-invasive, could improve short term, or working memory in people by up to 25%.

The treatment, called transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM), is applied to an area of the brain known as the right prefrontal cortex. This area is widely recognized as important for working memory. In their experiment, the team showed how working memory improved among research participants after several minutes of treatment. They were also able to track the changes in brain activity using electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring during treatment and testing.

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