The security of digital identities is threatened by future quantum technologies. In the hands of attackers, quantum computers will be able to break classical encryption methods. To fend off such attacks, four partners launched the Quant-ID project. In this project, they are researching the development of novel methods and systems that guarantee cryptographic security in the long term based on quantum random numbers and post-quantum cryptography. Highly critical areas, such as government institutions, banks or insurance companies, will thus receive…
Researchers at Purdue University have made a groundbreaking discovery in the field of thermal radiation, uncovering a new method for generating spinning thermal radiation in a controlled and efficient manner using artificially structured surfaces, known as metasurfaces. The team, led by Zubin Jacob, Purdue’s Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has published findings in the journal Science Advances, titled “Observation of non-vanishing optical helicity in thermal radiation from symmetry-broken metasurfaces.” Thermal radiation, which originates from random fluctuations in materials,…
A special issue of the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment lays the foundation for pursuing structural diversity as a new research direction in ecology. The issue, funded by the National Science Foundation, also describes the digital data collection methods that enable the new research direction, and the applications of the work in various ecosystems. “Structural diversity is thinking about what elements occupy a space and how they have been arranged in the space,” said the special issue’s lead editor, Songlin…
Rocks, rain and carbon dioxide help control Earth’s climate over thousands of years — like a thermostat — through a process called weathering. A new study led by Penn State scientists may improve our understanding of how this thermostat responds as temperatures change. “Life has been on this planet for billions of years, so we know Earth’s temperature has remained consistent enough for there to be liquid water and to support life,” said Susan Brantley, Evan Pugh University Professor and…
Volcanoes draw plenty of attention when they erupt. But new research led by the University of Washington shows that volcanoes leak a surprisingly high amount of their atmosphere- and climate-changing gases in their quiet phases. A Greenland ice core shows that volcanoes quietly release at least three times as much sulfur into the Arctic atmosphere than estimated by current climate models. The study, led by the University of Washington and published Jan. 2 in Geophysical Research Letters, has implications for…
The EU infrastructure project NextGenBat has ambitious goals: to significantly increase the performance of mobile energy storage devices such as batteries by employing new materials and laser-based manufacturing processes. To reach these goals, the partners are using an approach that will run laser machining processes in parallel. With special optics, up to several hundred partial beams can be generated, which can then be used to significantly increase productivity through parallel processing. However, only a handful of specialist companies such as…
Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have used a new device to identify a key membrane protein in urine that indicates whether the patient has a brain tumor. Their protein could be used to detect brain cancer, avoiding the need for invasive tests, and increasing the likelihood of tumors being detected early enough for surgery. This research could also have potential implications for detecting other types of cancer. The research was published in ACS Nano. Although early detection of many…
The signaling molecules of the immune system should trigger a response only where necessary. To prevent a life-threatening spread to the rest of the body, connective tissue can absorb these molecules like a sponge. A team led by Thomas Blankenstein presents this mechanism in “Nature Immunology.” Joint press release of Max Delbrück Center and Charité – Universitätsmedizin Medizin When the T cells of the immune system communicate, they do so with the help of cytokines. An important member of the…
Researchers led by Osaka University have used cryogenic electron microscopy analysis to reveal the structural change of the centromere at an atomic level during cell division. The genetic material inside cells is organized into structures called chromosomes. The centromere is essential for the correct division of the chromosomes via interaction with spindle microtubules when cells divide and grow. Now, a study by researchers at Osaka University has clarified the structure of the centromeric region in chicken cells using a technique…
Compact silicon photonic computing engine computes tiled matrix multiplication at a record-high 50 GHz clock frequency. “All things are numbers,” avowed Pythagoras. Today, 25 centuries later, algebra and mathematics are everywhere in our lives, whether we see them or not. The Cambrian-like explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) brought numbers even closer to us all, since technological evolution allows for parallel processing of a vast amounts of operations. Progressively, operations between scalars (numbers) were parallelized into operations between vectors and, subsequently,…
Trapped ions have previously only been entangled in one and the same laboratory. Now, teams led by Tracy Northup and Ben Lanyon from the University of Innsbruck have entangled two ions over a distance of 230 meters. The nodes of this network were housed in two labs at the Campus Technik to the west of Innsbruck, Austria. The experiment shows that trapped ions are a promising platform for future quantum networks that span cities and eventually continents. Trapped ions are…
Blocking an immune-regulating protein reverses the damage caused by acute and chronic kidney disease, a preclinical study suggests. In a world first, scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School, the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) and colleagues in Germany have shown that regenerative therapy to restore impaired kidney function may soon be a possibility. In a preclinical study reported in Nature Communications, the team found that blocking a damaging and scar-regulating protein called interleukin-11 (IL-11) enables damaged kidney cells to regenerate, restoring impaired…
Physicists using advanced muon spin spectroscopy at Paul Scherrer Institute PSI make the missing link between their recent breakthrough in a kagome metal and unconventional superconductivity. The team uncovered an unconventional superconductivity that can be tuned with pressure, giving exciting potential for engineering quantum materials. A year ago, a group of physicists led by PSI detected evidence of an unusual collective electron behaviour in a kagome metal, known as time-reversal symmetry-breaking charge order – a discovery that was published in…
Researchers at UCL (University College London) have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies. Researchers at UCL and the University of Cambridge have discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies. The newly discovered ice is amorphous…
Researchers used a chemical synthesis robot and computationally cost effective A.I. model to successfully predict and validate highly selective catalysts. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) has made headlines recently with the advent of ChatGPT’s language processing capabilities. Creating a similarly powerful tool for chemical reaction design remains a significant challenge, especially for complex catalytic reactions. To help address this challenge, researchers at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery and the Max Planck Institut für Kohlenforschung have demonstrated a machine learning…
Wyss Institute’s eRapid electrochemical sensor technology enables detection of SARS-CoV-2 antigen-specific antibodies to detect virus and assess vaccine-induced immunity. Not all SARS-CoV-2 infections are created equal. We have learned this through multiple virus waves are taking their toll on the world’s population. Improving vaccines and new anti-viral therapies that target distinct viral molecules (antigens) and the changes they undergo over time have helped to soften this blow. However, to control the disease even better and everywhere, we have to be…
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