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Category: computing

Exploring and manipulating the behavior of polar vortices in material may lead to new technology for faster data transfer and storage. Researchers used the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne and the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC to learn more.

Our high-speed, high-bandwidth world constantly requires new ways to process and store information. Semiconductors and magnetic materials have made up the bulk of data storage devices for decades. In recent years, however, researchers and engineers have turned to ferroelectric materials, a type of crystal that can be manipulated with electricity.

In 2016, the study of ferroelectrics got more interesting with the discovery of polar vortices — essentially spiral-shaped groupings of atoms — within the structure of the material. Now a team of researchers led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has uncovered new insights into the behavior of these vortices, insights that may be the first step toward using them for fast, versatile data processing and storage.

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A breakthrough astrophysics code, named Octo-Tiger, simulates the evolution of self-gravitating and rotating systems of arbitrary geometry using adaptive mesh refinement and a new method to parallelize the code to achieve superior speeds.

This new code to model stellar collisions is more expeditious than the established code used for . The research came from a unique collaboration between experimental computer scientists and astrophysicists in the Louisiana State University Department of Physics & Astronomy, the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, Indiana University Kokomo and Macquarie University, Australia, culminating in over of a year of benchmark testing and scientific simulations, supported by multiple NSF grants, including one specifically designed to break the barrier between computer science and astrophysics.

“Thanks to a significant effort across this collaboration, we now have a reliable computational framework to simulate stellar mergers,” said Patrick Motl, professor of physics at Indiana University Kokomo. “By substantially reducing the to complete a simulation, we can begin to ask new questions that could not be addressed when a single-merger simulation was precious and very time consuming. We can explore more parameter space, examine a simulation at very high spatial resolution or for longer times after a merger, and we can extend the simulations to include more complete physical models by incorporating radiative transfer, for example.”

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A team led by Prof. GUO Guangcan and Prof. ZOU Changling from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences realized efficient frequency conversion in microresonators via a degenerate sum-frequency process, and achieved cross-band frequency conversion and amplification of converted signal through observing the cascaded nonlinear optical effects inside the microresonator. The study was published in Physical Review Letters.

Coherent frequency process has wide application in classical and quantum information fields such as communication, detection, sensing, and imaging. As a bridge connecting wavebands between fiber telecommunications and atomic transition, coherent frequency conversion is a necessary interface for distributed quantum computing and quantum networks.

Integrated nonlinear photonic chip stands out because of its significant technological advances of improving by microresonator’s enhancing the light-matter interaction, along with other advantages like small size, great scalability, and low energy consumption. These make integrated nonlinear photonic chips an important platform to covert optical frequency efficiently and realize other nonlinear optical effects.

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3D printing is transforming everything from fashion and health care to transportation and toys. But this rapidly evolving technology, also known as additive manufacturing, can threaten national security and intellectual property rights.

To reduce illicit use of 3D printers, Zhanpeng Jin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, is developing a way to track the origin of 3D-printed items.

His concern was that, as long as people have the digital design for an item, which can be downloaded from the internet, sometimes as open-source material, people can print out anything they want, which can range from computer parts and toys to fully functional handguns and assault rifles.

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Li-ion batteries and other emerging lithium-based battery technologies are currently used to power a wide range of devices, including smartphones, laptops, tablets and cameras. Despite their advantages, batteries containing lithium do not always retain their performance over time.

One of the main reasons for the performance decay observed in some Li-based batteries is that the lithium contained within them sometimes becomes inactive or “dead.” This “dead lithium” can cause capacity decay and thermal runaway, which can ultimately reduce a battery’s lifespan and impair its performance.

Researchers at Zhejiang University of Technology in China and Argonne National Laboratory in the U.S. have recently devised a strategy to restore inactive lithium in Li anodes. This strategy, outlined in a paper published in Nature Energy, is based on a chemical reaction known as iodine redox.

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If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Arm is the technology company of the hour. Or one of, at least. The chip designer rose to great heights in the mobile phone biz and now its many license holders are looking to twist an ARM processor into something more computer-shaped. Arm is finding increasing number of advocates from Intel and AMD’s firm customers too: perhaps the most notable among them being Apple, with the M1 chip in MacBooks and the new iMac, but Amazon, Microsoft, and Arm’s prospective buyer, Nvidia, all have skin in the game.

Yet Intel has a plan: a brand new foundry business. That which will offer flexibility in a way that was largely ruled out by oppressive x86 licenses and Intel’s unwillingness to share in the past. It’s what Arm offers, after all. A way for companies to design a chip as they see fit, and leave the unwanted features on the cutting room floor.

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Telomeres are large nucleoproteins structures that cap the ends of chromosomes in eukaryotic cells. When a cell divides, a small portion of the telomere is lost due to the inherently incomplete process of genome replication. If left unchecked, over time the telomeres will reach a critically short length and the cell will face genomic instability, deterioration or death. To offset this shortening, an essential enzyme called telomerase rebuilds the telomeres by synthesizing new telomeric DNA repeats at chromosome ends. Kelly Nguyen’s group, in the LMB’s Structural Studies Division, has solved the first complete atomic model of this enzyme and discovered a histone dimer as novel telomerase subunits.

Telomeres act as a barrier to protect the genetic information from progressive degradation arising from incomplete DNA replication. Additionally, telomeres distinguish the natural chromosome ends from DNA double-strand breaks, thereby avoiding an illicit DNA damage response and preventing intrachromosomal fusion. This makes telomeres essential for the preservation of genome and chromosome stability. In previous research, Kelly had discovered the architecture and composition of human holoenzyme at 8 Å (Ångströms) resolution using cryo-EM. However, to understand the governing telomerase mediated maintenance, a high-resolution structure of the complex was required.

To conduct this study, Kelly’s group, in collaboration with Kathleen Collins at the University of California, Berkeley, and Rhiju Das at Stanford University, prepared telomerase by extracting it from cultured human cells, before imaging using cryo-EM—resulting in the collection of almost 44000 images. This data was analyzed using RELION—a complex computer program developed at the LMB—in order to achieve the 3.4−3.8 Å structure of telomerase. From this Kelly and members of her group, George Ghanim, Adam Fountain, and Marike van Roon, were able to build the first complete atomic model of telomerase, with 12 protein subunits and telomerase RNA. By completing the structure to such a high resolution, the group was not only able to illuminate how common RNA and protein motifs work together, but also to highlight new interactions.

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In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA ’s New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready to carry out the instructions.

As New Horizons crossed the solar system, and its distance from Earth jumped from millions to billions of miles, that time between contacts grew from a few minutes to several hours. And on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons reached a rare deep-space milepost – 50 astronomical units from the Sun, or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.

Here’s one way to imagine just how far 50 AU is: Think of the solar system laid out on a neighborhood street; the Sun is one house to the left of “home” (or Earth), Mars would be the next house to the right, and Jupiter would be just four houses to the right. New Horizons would be 50 houses down the street, 17 houses beyond Pluto!

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Summary: Computer-generated, or virtual humans, prove to be just as good as humans in helping people practice leadership skills.

Source: Frontiers.

A virtual human can be as good as a flesh-and-blood one when it comes to helping people practice new leadership skills. That’s the conclusion from new research published in the journal Frontiers in Virtual Reality that evaluated the effectiveness of computer-generated characters in a training scenario compared to real human role-players in a conventional setting.

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