- Helldivers 2 players built an anti-bug defense system over a month ago, and thanks to a new Major Order now they have to destroy it Gamesradar
- As Helldivers 2 players pick the new Airburst Rocket Launcher from the latest Major Order, Super Earth sends potatoes to remember the lost Gamesradar
- Helldivers 2 Players Being Forced To Pick Between Two New Stratagems Kotaku
- Helldivers 2’s new stratagem gamble is one its dev hopes will pay off PCGamesN
- Today in Helldivers 2: Super Earth admits those Termicide towers we turned on last month actually made the bug population explode overnight, and guess whose job it is to clean this mess up PC Gamer
Tag Archives: built
Prosecutors say school shooter’s father was ‘grossly negligent,’ while defense says his manslaughter case is built on ‘hindsight’ – CNN
- Prosecutors say school shooter’s father was ‘grossly negligent,’ while defense says his manslaughter case is built on ‘hindsight’ CNN
- Prosecutor urges jury to convict Michigan school shooter’s dad, says he could have prevented tragedy Fox News
- Why we may never know where murder weapon was in days before Oxford shooting WDIV ClickOnDetroit
- James Crumbley Declines to Testify in Oxford High School Shooting Trial The New York Times
- Prosecutor urges jury to convict Michigan school shooter’s dad as both sides rest KOMO News
Where the 20 new Latter-day Saint temples will be built as Russell Nelson’s record tally continues to rise – Salt Lake Tribune
- Where the 20 new Latter-day Saint temples will be built as Russell Nelson’s record tally continues to rise Salt Lake Tribune
- 20 new temples announced by President Nelson at October general conference Deseret News
- Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announces 20 new temples Axios
- President Nelson announces 20 temples at close of general conference, 2nd most at one time KSL.com
- Latest from Sunday’s LDS General Conference: President Russell Nelson urges members to ‘think celestial,’ announces 20 new temples Salt Lake Tribune
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Meet BLOOMChat: An Open-Source 176-Billion-Parameter Multilingual Chat Large Language Model (LLM) Built on Top of the BLOOM Model – MarkTechPost
- Meet BLOOMChat: An Open-Source 176-Billion-Parameter Multilingual Chat Large Language Model (LLM) Built on Top of the BLOOM Model MarkTechPost
- Meta’s open-source speech AI recognizes over 4,000 spoken languages Engadget
- Meta’s new AI models can recognize and produce speech for more than 1,000 languages MIT Technology Review
- Allen Institute for AI Announces OLMo: An Open Language Model Made By Scientists For Scientists MarkTechPost
- Meta’s Breakthrough Language Model on Par with GPT-4 and Bard in Performance Analytics India Magazine
- View Full Coverage on Google News
The Google Tensor 3 for the Pixel 8 line could be built using Samsung’s next-gen 4nm process node – PhoneArena
- The Google Tensor 3 for the Pixel 8 line could be built using Samsung’s next-gen 4nm process node PhoneArena
- Samsung To Start Mass Production Of 3rd-Generation 4nm Chips In H1 2023, Will Likely Be Used For The Tensor G3, More Wccftech
- Samsung is ready to begin mass production of third-gen 4nm chipsets – GSMArena.com news GSMArena.com
- Samsung to mass produce third-gen 4nm semiconductor chips soon SamMobile – Samsung news
- Samsung Electronics to Begin Mass Production of Third-Generation 4-nm Products in 1st Half of 2023 BusinessKorea
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Scientists Have Built a Macroscopic Tractor Beam Using Laser Light : ScienceAlert
Tractor beams make intuitive sense. Matter and energy interact with each other in countless ways throughout the Universe. Magnetism and gravity are both natural forces that can draw objects together, so there’s sort of a precedent.
But engineering an actual tractor beam is something different.
A tractor beam is a device that can move an object from a distance. The idea comes from a 1931 sci-fi story called SpaceHounds of IPC:
me the Bronx cheer on. The Titanians have had a tractor ray for ages – he sent me complete dope on it – and the Jovians ‘ve got ’em both. We’ll have ’em in three days, and it ought to be fairly simple to dope out the opposite of a tractor, too – a pusher or pressor beam.”
If science fiction had anything to say about it, tractor beams would already be commonplace, and we could thank Star Trek and Star Wars for their proliferation.
But tractor beams do already exist, though their reach is only microscopic.
Microscopic tractor beams are employed in devices called optical tweezers. Optical tweezers use lasers to move microscopic objects like atoms and nanoparticles. They’re used in biology, nanotechnology, and in medicine.
These tractor beams work on microscopic objects but aren’t strong enough to pull larger macroscopic objects.
Now a team of researchers has successfully demonstrated a macroscopic tractor beam. They published the paper explaining their work in the journal Optics Express. Its title is “Macroscopic laser pulling based on the Knudsen force in rarefied gas,” and the lead author is Lei Wang from QingDao University of Science and Technology in China.
“In previous studies, the light-pulling force was too small to pull a macroscopical object,” said Wang.
“With our new approach, the light pulling force has a much larger amplitude. In fact, it is more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure used to drive a solar sail, which uses the momentum of photons to exert a small pushing force.”
This macroscopic tractor beam only works under particular laboratory conditions, so it’s a demonstration, not a practical development. At least not yet.
First of all, it works on purpose-built things: macroscopic graphene-SiO2 composite objects that the researchers built for the experiments.
Secondly, it works in a rarefied gaseous environment, which has a much lower pressure than Earth’s atmosphere. While that limits their effectiveness here on Earth, not every world has as much atmospheric pressure as our planet.
“Our technique provides a non-contact and long-distance pulling approach, which may be useful for various scientific experiments,” said Wang.
“The rarefied gas environment we used to demonstrate the technique is similar to what is found on Mars. Therefore, it might have the potential for one day manipulating vehicles or aircraft on Mars.”
Their device works on the principle of gas heating. A laser heats the composite objects, but one side is hotter than the other. Gas molecules on the back side receive more energy, which pulls the object. Combined with the lower pressure in the rarefied gas environment, the object moves.
The researchers built a torsional – or turning – pendulum device made from their graphene-SiO2 composite structure to demonstrate the laser-pulling phenomenon. That demonstration made it visible to the naked eye. They used another device to measure the effect.
“We found that the pulling force was more than three orders of magnitudes larger than the light pressure,” said Wang. “In addition, the laser pulling is repeatable, and the force can be tuned by changing the laser power.”
Other researchers have tackled tractor beams in recent years with mixed results. NASA was interested in pursuing the idea of using tractor beams to gather samples with the MSL Curiosity surface rover. One of Curiosity’s instruments is the ChemCam.
It includes a laser that vaporizes rock or regolith and then a micro imager to measure its components spectroscopically. But NASA wondered if a tractor beam could draw tiny particles from the vaporized sample into the rover for a more complete study.
A NASA NIAC presentation from 2010 said: “If Tractor Beam Technology was included in a ‘ChemCam2’ to pull in dust and plasma particles, tractor beams could add a suite of additional science capabilities:
- laser desorptive ion spectroscopy
- mass spectrometry
- RAMAN spectroscopy
- X-Ray Fluorescence”
The same presentation said that tractor beams could be used to collect particles from comet tails, ice plumes on Enceladus, and even clouds in Earth’s atmosphere or other atmospheres.
That never materialized, but it illustrates how compelling the idea is.
This new research produced interesting results, though it’s nowhere near an actual practical implementation. There’s a lot of work and engineering needed before it even approaches practicality.
For one thing, there needs to be a well-understood theoretical underpinning that describes how the effect works on objects with different sizes and shapes and with lasers of different powers in different atmospheres.
The researchers know this, of course, but point out that it’s still an effective demonstration of feasibility.
“Our work demonstrates that flexible light manipulation of a macroscopical object is feasible when the interactions between the light, object, and medium are carefully controlled,” said Wang.
“It also shows the complexity of laser-matter interactions and that many phenomena are far from being understood on both macro and micro scales.”
The critical part is that this study moves tractor beams from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That’s a significant threshold that’s difficult to cross.
“This work expands the scope of optical pulling from microscale to macroscale, which has great potential in macroscale optical manipulations,” the authors write in their conclusion.
Spacecraft may very well use tractor beams one day, but they’re unlikely to look anything like they do in science fiction. Star Wars, Star Trek, and Spacehounds of IPC all feature tractor beams in combat and conflict.
But in reality, they could turn out to be valuable scientific tools.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.
Webb Telescope Spots Ancient Galaxy Built Like the Milky Way
The Webb Space Telescope’s latest target is one previously imaged by Hubble: the distant barred spiral galaxy EGS23205. Targets like this one will boost our understanding of the early universe and how ancient stars and galaxies took form.
The two images above show EGS23205 as seen by Hubble and Webb. Hubble’s image of the galaxy (taken in near-infrared) is much noisier, and the structure of the galaxy is harder to discern. But Webb’s image (at mid-infrared wavelengths) is much crisper, revealing a clear bar of stars stretching out from the galactic center.
Stellar bars are huge galactic cross-sections composed of countless stars. The bars play an important role in galactic evolution; they push gas toward the galactic center, helping fuel star formation and feed the supermassive black holes that lie within galactic nuclei. Our own Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy.
Analysis of the image was submitted to the preprint server arXiv last year. Webb has imaged many ancient galaxies in its mere six months of scientific operations.
Some of Webb’s targets are among the earliest galaxies yet seen, and they appear to Webb as they were just several hundred million years after the Big Bang (the universe is now close to 14 billion years old).
EGS23205 is seen as it was about 11 billion years ago. The image reveals that even early galaxies had well-defined bars (spiral galaxies were previously thought to be much later arrivals in the universe).
G/O Media may get a commission
“The bars hardly visible in Hubble data just popped out in the JWST image, showing the tremendous power of JWST to see the underlying structure in galaxies,” said Shardha Jogee, an astronomer at UT Austin and co-author of the research, in a press release.
Webb has previously imaged other objects once captured by Hubble. In October, the new $10 billion observatory beheld the Pillars of Creation, huge plumes of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. In the same month, the Webb team produced an image of merging galaxies 270 million light-years from Earth, imaged by Hubble back in 2008.
The two space telescopes observe at different wavelengths for the most part—Hubble primarily at visible wavelengths and Webb primarily in the infrared and near-infrared. Webb’s vivid handiwork is built on the mechanical shoulders of Hubble. Side-by-side image comparisons show the differences in these impressive observatories, and what’s possible with the newest technology.
More: The Year Ahead in Astronomy
Laser Scanning Microscope Built With Blu-ray Parts
Laser scanning microscopes are useful for all kinds of tiny investigations. As it turns out, you can build one using parts salvaged from a Blu-ray player, as demonstrated by [Doctor Volt].
The trick is repurposing the optical pickup unit that is typically used to read optical discs. In particular, the build relies on the photodiodes that are usually used to compute focus error when tracking a disc. To turn this into a laser scanning microscope, the optical pickup is fitted to a 3D printed assembly that can slew it linearly for imaging purposes.
Meanwhile, the Blu-ray player’s hardware is repurposed to create a sample tray that slews on the orthogonal axis for full X-Y control. An ESP32 is then charged with running motion control and the laser. It also captures signals from the photodiodes and sends them to a computer for collation and display.
[Doctor Volt] demonstrates the microscope by imaging a small fabric fragment. The scanned area covers less than 1 mm x 1 mm, with a resolution of 127 x 127, though this could be improved with finer pitch on the slew mechanisms.
While it’s hardly what we’d call a beginner’s project, this technique still looks a lot more approachable than building your own scanning electron microscope.
Enigmatic canal-filled ruins may have been above water when built
Enlarge / The distinctive ruins at Nan Madol.
Even by the standards of enigmatic ancient ruins, Nan Madol is strange. Constructed primarily of “logs” made of volcanic rock, the site consists of dozens of small artificial islands separated by canals that are flushed by the tides. It’s built on the shores of the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, which has an enigmatic history, seemingly remaining unpopulated as islands to the north and south were settled during the Polynesian expansion.
Now, a team of researchers is offering a single explanation that accounts for many of these oddities: The island of Pohnpei is slowly sinking, taking evidence of an earlier settlement beneath the waves. And, if their estimate of its subsidence is accurate, Nan Madol would have been above the waves at the time of its construction.
Ups and downs
The human expansion into the scattered islands of the Pacific started over 3,000 years ago and primarily took place upon two parallel routes north and south of the equator. The southern route was peopled by the ancestors of the Polynesians, while the northern route was derived from people who likely originated in the Philippines. There were islands between the two along the equator, but those weren’t settled until roughly a thousand years later when the descendants of the first wave expanded from the islands they had initially populated.
One explanation for this involves changes in sea level. Many of the islands between the northern and southern expansions are low-lying atolls, which could have been entirely underwater at that time. That’s because sea levels across the equatorial Pacific were higher as the Earth’s crust adjusted to the redistribution of water away from massive ice sheets of the last glacial period. In this view, ocean levels in this region gradually dropped, revealing more of these atolls and making them easier to settle.
That doesn’t explain everything, however. Pohnpei and Kosrae islands are in the region, and they’re both centered on volcanic peaks that would have extended well above sea level the entire time. Yet there’s no indication they were settled before other islands in this region. Roughly 3,000 years after their settlement, a new culture arrived and constructed substantial urban centers: Nan Madol on Pohnpei and Leluh on Kosrae.
Both sites feature similar construction. Large basalt columns, like the ones found at the Giant’s Causeway or Devils Tower, are arranged a bit like the logs on a log cabin. Blocks of coral are also used. While Leluh was built on a small island off the coast of Kosrae, Nan Madol is in the water, with buildings separated by canals, giving it the Venice of the Pacific nickname. While the materials and architecture are similar to each other and shared with other sites in the Pacific, the canals are unique to Nan Madol.
Rising tides
The new work started with a look at sediments formed in mangrove swamps. Mangroves only grow within a limited range relative to the high tide mark of the area, and will trap sediment in that region. If tide levels are stable, that limits sediment formation to a range of less than a meter around the high-tide mark. Working with sediments on these islands, however, the research team found mangrove sediments up to six meters thick in areas around the islands. This implies that the islands have been steadily sinking, allowing sediments to build up on top of previous layers.
Tracking these sediments at multiple sites, combined with carbon dating of materials in the sediment, allowed the researchers to reconstruct the sea level over the last 5,000 years or so. These show that the islands likely subsided for most of that period. So, while the ocean level in the area may have been dropping for part of the period, the local sea levels were actually rising as the islands slowly slipped into the sea. A GPS station on Leluh indicates that the subsidence has continued to the present.
(The drop may be related to the fact that these islands are the products of hot spot volcanism, driven by a plume of hot material in the mantle. But the Pacific plate has now moved so that the hot spot was no longer under these two islands.)
Overall, the researchers conclude that the two islands could have been settled during the initial expansion into the Pacific. But if people stayed on the coast as they did on many other islands, then remnants of the first settlements would be underwater at present. People would undoubtedly move further inland for things like agriculture, but these activities may not have left anything that would survive as an artifact.
As for Nan Madol, the reconstruction of sea levels suggests that they were about a meter lower at the site when construction started. This would have left the “canals” completely dry except at extremely high tides. Except during storm surges, the worst inundation would have been just a few centimeters. Even several hundred years later, when the rulers who built Nan Madol were displaced and the site abandoned, the canals would have been dry at low tide. So, they probably shouldn’t be viewed as canals at all.
PNAS, 2022. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2210863119 (About DOIs).
A ‘Wormhole’ Built on a Quantum Computer Teleported Information as Predicted : ScienceAlert
For the first time, scientists have created a quantum computing experiment for studying the dynamics of wormholes – that is, shortcuts through spacetime that could get around relativity’s cosmic speed limits.
Wormholes are traditionally the stuff of science fiction, ranging from Jodie Foster’s wild ride in Contact to the time-bending plot twists in Interstellar. But the researchers behind the experiment, reported in the December 1 issue of the journal Nature, hope that their work will help physicists study the phenomenon for real.
“We found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole, yet is sufficiently small to implement on today’s quantum hardware,” Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu said in a news release. Spiropulu, the Nature paper’s senior author, is the principal investigator for a federally funded research program known as Quantum Communication Channels for Fundamental Physics.
Don’t pack your bags for Alpha Centauri just yet: This wormhole simulation is nothing more than a simulation, analogous to a computer-generated black hole or supernova.
And physicists still don’t see any conditions under which a traversable wormhole could actually be created. Someone would have to create negative energy first.
Columbia theoretical physicist Peter Woit warned against making too much of a to-do over the research.
“The claim that ‘Physicists Create a Wormhole’ is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general,” he wrote on his blog, which is called Not Even Wrong.
The main aim of the research was to shed light on a concept known as quantum gravity, which seeks to unify the theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
Those two theories have done an excellent job of explaining how gravity works and how the subatomic world is structured, respectively, but they don’t match up well with each other.
One of the big questions focuses on whether wormhole teleportation might follow the principles that are behind quantum entanglement.
That quantum phenomenon is better understood, and it’s even been demonstrated in the real world, thanks to Nobel-winning research: It involves linking subatomic particles or other quantum systems in a way that allows for what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”
Spiropulu and her colleagues, including principal authors Daniel Jafferis and Alexander Zlokapa, created a computer model that applies the physics of quantum entanglement to wormhole dynamics.
Their program was based on a theoretical framework known as the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model, or SYK.
The big challenge was that the program had to be executed on a quantum computer. Google’s Sycamore quantum processing chip was just powerful enough to take on the task, with an assist from conventional machine learning tools.
“We employed [machine] learning techniques to find and prepare a simple SYK-like quantum system that could be encoded in the current quantum architectures and that would preserve the gravitational properties,” Spiropulu said.
“In other words, we simplified the microscopic description of the SYK quantum system and studied the resulting effective model that we found on the quantum processor.”
The researchers inserted a quantum bit, or qubit, of encoded information into one of two entangled systems – and then watched the information emerge from the other system. From their perspective, it was as if the qubit passed between black holes through a wormhole.
“It took a really long time to arrive at the results, and we surprised ourselves with the outcome,” said Caltech researcher Samantha Davis, one of the study’s co-authors.
The team found that the wormhole simulation allowed information to flow from one system to the other when the computerized equivalent of negative energy was applied, but not when positive energy was applied instead. That matches what theorists would expect from a real-world wormhole.
As quantum circuits become more complex, the researchers aim to conduct higher-fidelity simulations of wormhole behavior – which could lead to new twists in fundamental theories.
“The relationship between quantum entanglement, spacetime, and quantum gravity is one of the most important questions in fundamental physics and an active area of theoretical research,” Spiropulu said.
“We are excited to take this small step toward testing these ideas on quantum hardware and will keep going.”
In addition to Jafferis, Zlokapa, Spiropulu and Davis, the authors of the Nature paper, titled “Traversable Wormhole Dynamics on a Quantum Processor,” include Joseph Lykken, David Kolchmeyer, Nikolai Lauk, and Hartmut Neven.
This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.