Researchers have identified more than 100 giant planets that potentially host moons capable of supporting life. Their work will guide the design of future telescopes that can detect these potential moons and look for tell-tale signs of life, called biosignatures, in their atmospheres. Since the 2009 launch of NASA’s Kepler telescope, scientists have identified thousands …
Intel researchers are testing a tiny new “spin qubit” chip. The new chip was created in Intel’s D1D Fab in Oregon using the same silicon manufacturing techniques that the company has perfected for creating billions of traditional computer chips. Smaller than a pencil’s eraser, it is the tiniest quantum computing chip Intel has made. The …
Researchers from EPFL’s Photovoltaics Laboratory and the CSEM PV-center have developed an economically competitive solution to silicon solar cells. They have integrated a perovskite cell directly on top of a standard silicon-based cell, obtaining a record efficiency of 25.2 percent. Perovskite complements silicon. Perovskite converts blue and green light more efficiently, while silicon is better …
A new analysis of data from NASA’s Dawn mission suggests that organic matter may exist in surprisingly high concentrations on the dwarf planet’s surface. To get an initial idea of how abundant those compounds might be, the original research team compared the VIR data from Ceres with laboratory reflectance spectra of organic material formed on …
The Base 11 Space Challenge is a $1 million+ prize for a student-led university team to design, build, and launch a liquid-propelled, single-stage rocket to an altitude of 100 kilometers (the Karman Line) by December 30, 2021. Annual competitions and milestone prizes will also be provided. Milestone prizes will include * design of the liquid-fuel …
Tokyo Tech researchers have designed and fabricated a tiny, fast, reliable and accurate 28-GHz transceiver meant for stable high-speed 5G
Nippon Telephone and Tokyo Institute of Technology have jointly developed an ultra high-speed IC for wireless front-end that operates on a terahertz frequency band, and in the 300 GHz band they have succeeded in developing the world’s fastest 100 gigabit per second wireless transmission data rate. Unused terahertz waves can be applied to high-speed wireless …
The gravity waves that were detected might have been from the collision of wormholes. If there are gravitational echoes then the collision was from wormholes and not blackholes. There is a problem with black holes—they present an edge, called an event horizon, from which nothing can escape. This is in conflict with quantum mechanics, whose …
Researchers created a new class of two-dimensional artificial materials with ferroelectric-like properties at room temperature that don’t exist in nature yet can conduct electricity. Above – This image shows the positions of atoms in a ferroelectric-like metal that contains barium titanate, strontium titanate and lanthanum titanate. Image: Zhen Wang and Yimei Zhu; image obtained at …
Robots and drones for delivery were all over the annual Global Smart Logistics Summit. Several automated guided vehicles (AGVs), reminiscent of Roomba’s robot vacuum cleaners, were moving metal racks stacked with piles of boxes. There were autonomous drones that can carry a payload of as much as a metric ton to self-driving carts that can …
Intel’s director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, sees a path with their current quantum technology to perhaps 1000 qubits. This is the highlights of what he told Spectrum IEEE. Intel is working on multiple qubit technologies. They were initially exclusively superconducting chips. The size of the qubits in silicon spin qubit is a million times …