Most solar panels are placed flat on rooftops because they are designed to harness solar energy when the sun is directly overhead. However, when the angle of the sun’s rays hitting the panel changes, traditional panels quickly become less efficient.
To get around this inefficiency, scientists have been experimenting with a variety of new solar cell technologies, including nanoscale 3D structures to trap light and increase the amount of solar energy absorbed. However in a new study in Energy and Environmental Science, a team of MIT researchers has taken a different approach by changing the shape of the solar panels. The researchers were able to develop a 3D shape that allows for 20 times greater power output.
Topology in optics and photonics has been a hot topic since 1,890 where singularities in electromagnetic fields have been considered. The recent award of the Nobel prize for topology developments in condensed matter physics has led to renewed surge in topology in optics with most recent developments in implementing condensed matter particle-like topological structures in photonics. Recently, topological photonics, especially the topological electromagnetic pulses, hold promise for nontrivial wave-matter interactions and provide additional degrees of freedom for information and energy transfer. However, to date the topology of ultrafast transient electromagnetic pulses had been largely unexplored.
In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, physicists in the UK and Singapore report a new family of electromagnetic pulses, the exact solutions of Maxwell’s equation with toroidal topology, in which topological complexity can be continuously controlled, namely supertoroidal topology. The electromagnetic fields in such supertoroidal pulses have skyrmionic structures as they propagate in free space with the speed of light.
Skyrmions, sophisticated topological particles originally proposed as a unified model of the nucleon by Tony Skyrme in 1,962 behave like nanoscale magnetic vortices with spectacular textures. They have been widely studied in many condensed matter systems, including chiral magnets and liquid crystals, as nontrivial excitations showing great importance for information storing and transferring. If skyrmions can fly, open up infinite possibilities for the next generation of informatics revolution.
Laura Hiscott reviews Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future by The Quantum Daily.
How could quantum computing help us to fix climate change? This is the question at the heart of Quantum Technology | Our Sustainable Future, a half-hour-long documentary published on YouTube in July.
Made by “The Quantum Daily”, a resource for news and information on all things quantum, the documentary consists of interviews with people working in a host of organizations in the sector, from Oxford Instruments NanoScience to Google Quantum AI. The main idea is that, since quantum computers have the potential to be much more powerful than classical ones, they could speed up the discovery of solutions, such as molecules that would be very effective at carbon capture.
Trees provide the air we breathe, and now, in an interesting turn of events, they might also help to power our electronics. A team of researchers from Brown University and the University of Maryland developed a new material that can be used in solid-state batteries to improve the safety and power of traditional batteries by replacing the liquids typically used in lithium-ion cells, a press statement reveals.
The material in question is a kind of cellulose nanofibril, which takes the form of polymer nanotubes derived from wood. The researchers found that it could be combined with copper to produce a paper-thin material that has an ion conductivity between 10 and 100 times better than other polymer ion conductors.
Topology in optics and photonics has been a hot topic since 1,890 where singularities in electromagnetic fields have been considered. The recent award of the Nobel prize for topology developments in condensed matter physics has led to renewed surge in topology in optics with most recent developments in implementing condensed matter particle-like topological structures in photonics. Recently, topological photonics, especially the topological electromagnetic pulses, hold promise for nontrivial wave-matter interactions and provide additional degrees of freedom for information and energy transfer. However, to date the topology of ultrafast transient electromagnetic pulses had been largely unexplored.
In their paper Nat. Commun., physicists in the UK and Singapore report a new family of electromagnetic pulses, the exact solutions of Maxwell’s equation with toroidal topology, in which topological complexity can be continuously controlled, namely supertoroidal topology. The electromagnetic fields in such supertoroidal pulses have skyrmionic structures as they propagate in free space with the speed of light.
Skyrmions, sophisticated topological particles originally proposed as a unified model of the nucleon by Tony Skyrme in 1,962 behave like nanoscale magnetic vortices with spectacular textures. They have been widely studied in many condensed matter systems, including chiral magnets and liquid crystals, as nontrivial excitations showing great importance for information storing and transferring. If skyrmions can fly, open up infinite possibilities for the next generation of informatics revolution.
Only a matter of time til we can have nanobots clearing this out.
In a major breakthrough, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have discovered how amyloid beta — the neurotoxin believed to be at the root of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) — forms in axons and related structures that connect neurons in the brain, where it causes the most damage. Their findings, published in Cell Reports, could serve as a guidepost for developing new therapies to prevent the onset of this devastating neurological disease.
Among his many contributions to research on AD, Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, vice chair of Neurology and co-director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at MGH, led a team in 1986 that discovered the first Alzheimer’s disease gene, known as APP, which provides instructions for making amyloid protein precursor (APP). When this protein is cut (or cleaved) by enzymes — first, beta secretase, followed by gamma secretase — the byproduct is amyloid beta (sometimes shortened to Abeta). Large deposits of amyloid beta are believed to cause neurological destruction that results in AD. Amyloid beta formed in the brain’s axons and nerve endings causes the worst damage in AD by impairing communication between nerve cells (or neurons) in the brain. Researchers around the world have worked intensely to find ways to block the formation of amyloid beta by preventing cleavage by beta secretase and gamma secretase. However, these approaches have been hampered by safety issues.
Despite years of research, a major mystery has remained. “We knew that Abeta is made in the axons of the brain’s nerve cells, but we didn’t know how,” says Tanzi. He and his colleagues probed the question by studying the brains of mice, as well as with a research tool known as Alzheimer’s in a dish, a three-dimensional cell culture model of the disease created in 2014 by Tanzi and a colleague, Doo Yeon Kim, PhD. Earlier, in 2,013 several other MGH researchers, including neurobiologist Dora Kovacs, PhD (who is married to Tanzi), and Raja Bhattacharyya, PhD, a member of Tanzi’s lab, showed that a form of APP that has undergone a process called palmitoylation (palAPP) gives rise to amyloid beta. That study indicated that, within the neuron, palAPP is transported in a fatty vesicle (or sac) known as a lipid raft. But there are many forms of lipid rafts.
Mitochondrial disorders, nano-medicine drug delivery, and innovative therapeutic interventions — dr. volkmar weissig scd, phd — president, world mitochondria society — professor, midwestern university.
Dr. Volkmar Weissig, Sc. D., Ph.D. is a Tenured Full Professor of Pharmacology, Chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Co-Director of the Nanomedicine Center of Excellence in Translational Cancer Research, at Midwestern University, Glendale, AZ, USA.
Dr. Weissig received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry, and his postdoctoral Sc. D. degree in Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the Martin-Luther University in Halle (Germany).
Dr. Weissig completed several years of postdoctoral fellowships at the Cardiology Research Center in Moscow (Russia), at the Academic Department of Medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London (UK), at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Czechoslovakian Academy of Science in Prague (CSFR), at the College of Pharmacy and the College of Medicine at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, and at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA.
Before joining the faculty at Midwestern University, Dr. Weissig was an Assistant Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
Dr. Weissig holds 16 patents and he has published over 100 research papers, review articles and book chapters, mostly in the area of nano drug delivery systems. He also edited and published 8 books. He serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Liposome Research and he is member of several other Editorial Boards. In July 2009 he was inducted into the World Technology Network as a Fellow. In October 2014 Dr. Weissig was elected Inaugural President of the World Mitochondria Society.
Ray Kurzweil — Singularitarian Immortalist, Director of Engineering at Google, famous inventor, author of How to Create a Mind http://GF2045.com/speakers/.
A world-class prolific inventor and leading futurist author, “the restless genius” (Wall Street Journal) points to 2045 for the technological singularity when A.I. will surpass human intelligence in his New York Times best seller The Singularity is Near, Amazon’s #1 book in science and philosophy.
In this video Ray Kurzweil discusses his predictions about radical life extension, singularity, life expansion and the imminence of physical immortality. He invites participants to the second international Global Future 2045 congress (June 2013) http://www.GF2045.com.
“If we have radical life extension only, we would get profoundly bored, we’d have profound existential ennui, running out of things to do, and new ideas, but that’s not what’s going to happen. In addition to radical life extension, we’re going to have radical life expansion, we’re going to have millions of virtual environments to explore, we’re going to literally expand our brains.”
“We’ll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly, as well as our environments in virtual reality, but it will feel very real. We’ll ultimately be able to do that with real reality too, like self-organizing swarms of nanobots that can link themselves up into a virtual body.” says Ray Kurzweil.
For more information about the GF2045 congress, please visit http://www.GF2045.com
Quantum technology typically employs qubits (quantum bits) consisting of, for example, single electrons, photons or atoms. A group of TU Delft researchers has now demonstrated the ability to teleport an arbitrary qubit state from a single photon onto an optomechanical device—consisting of a mechanical structure comprising billions of atoms. Their breakthrough research, now published in Nature Photonics, enables real-world applications such as quantum internet repeater nodes while also allowing quantum mechanics itself to be studied in new ways.
Quantum optomechanics
The field of quantum optomechanics uses optical means to control mechanical motion in the quantum regime. The first quantum effects in microscale mechanical devices were demonstrated about ten years ago. Focused efforts have since resulted in entangled states between optomechanical devices as well as demonstrations of an optomechanical quantum memory. Now, the group of Simon Gröblacher, of the Kavli Institute of Nanoscience and the Department of Quantum Nanoscience at Delft University of Technology, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Campinas in Brazil, has shown the first successful teleportation of an arbitrary optical qubit state onto a micromechanical quantum memory.
