From kurzweilai.net: Google* is developing a quantum computer that it believes will outperform the world’s top supercomputers, according to an August 31 New Scientist article and sourced to researchers contacted by the magazine. Google’s ambitious goal is to achieve “quantum supremacy”— which would be achieved when “quantum devices without error correction can perform a well-defined [...]
From nanowerk news: Scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) have developed a new spray-on material with a remarkable ability to repel water (ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, "Ultra-Durable and Transparent Self-Cleaning Surfaces by Large-Scale Self-Assembly of Hierarchical Interpenetrated Polymer Networks").The new protective coating could eventually be used to waterproof mobile phones, prevent ice [...]
From nanowerk news: DNA, our genetic material, normally has the structure of a twisted rope ladder. Experts call this structure a double helix. Among other things, it is stabilized by stacking forces between base pairs. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded at measuring these forces for the very first time on [...]
From cbc news: NASA's first asteroid-sampling spacecraft, equipped with sophisticated Canadian mapping technology, took off Thursday night to cheering crowds gathered to witness the start of its seven-year quest. Read about the OSIRIS-REx mission in detail here. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket lifted off at 7:05 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Perched on top of the 19-story rocket [...]
From an article by W. Patrick McCray at slate.com: Emerging technologies are curious things. With their aura of risk and disruption, they seem to come out of nowhere—but their patina of novelty typically camouflages a much longer history. Cloud computing descended from 1960s-era computational time-sharing; Nikola Tesla wrote about the possibilities of self-driving cars decades ago. [...]
From Philip Ball at BBC Earth: Several physicists have suggested that our Universe is not real and is instead a giant simulation. Should we care? Are you real? What about me? These used to be questions that only philosophers worried about. Scientists just got on with figuring out how the world is, and why. But [...]
From AZONano: Scientists have attempted to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes for decades, in order to develop high-performance electronics that are extremely fast or consume less power, prolonging the battery life and resulting in faster wireless communication and rapid processing speeds for devices such as laptops and smartphones. A number of challenges have [...]
By McGill Reporter Staff McGill has been successful in the national competition for a massive amount of research funding under the federal government’s Canada First Excellence Research Fund (CFREF), which will provide the University with an $84-million grant over seven years to support an ambitious effort in neuroscience to advance understanding of the human brain [...]
From scienmag.com: When looking at bacteria, you typically see also flagella: long hairs that protrudes from the bacteria's body. The key function of the flagella is movement – what scientists call 'motility'. The flagella give the bacteria the ability to swim in their environment by rotating like propellers. Bacteria can have a different number of flagella, [...]
From an article at phys.org: A senior fellow at the Faculty of Chemistry, MSU, Vladimir Bochenkov, together with his colleagues from Denmark, have established the mechanism of interaction of silver nanoparticles with the cells of the immune system. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications. "Currently, a large number of products contain silver nanoparticles—antibacterial [...]
