The U.S. and China are locked in a fierce battle in the race for Mars. China’s Zhurong rover is circling Mars as the country attempts to land a spacecraft on the red planet for the first time, just months after NASA landed its Perseverance rover. Photos: NASA; CCTV
Category Archives: Science
TOP JOURNALS: RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE (MAY 14, 2021)
TOP JOURNALS: RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE (May 7, 2021)
Science: Stone Age Burial Site In Kenya, Metal-Free Rechargeable Batteries
The earliest evidence of deliberate human burial in Africa, and a metal-free rechargeable battery.
In this episode:
00:44 Human burial practices in Stone Age Africa
The discovery of the burial site of a young child in a Kenyan cave dated to around 78 thousand years ago sheds new light on how Stone Age populations treated their dead.
Research Article: Martinón-Torres et al.
News and Views: A child’s grave is the earliest known burial site in Africa
09:15 Research Highlights
How warming seas led to a record low in Northwestern Pacific typhoons, and the Arctic bird that maintains a circadian rhythm despite 24 hour sunlight.
Research Highlight: Warming seas brought an eerie calm to a stormy region
Research Highlight: The world’s northernmost bird is a clock-watcher
11:35 A metal-free rechargeable battery
Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised portable electronics, but there are significant issues surrounding their recyclability and the mining of the metals within them. To address these problems, a team of researchers have developed a metal-free rechargeable battery that breaks down to its component parts on demand.
Research Article: Nguyen et al.
Science: Rise Of ‘Exascale Supercomputers’ (Video)
The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.
The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power. So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers. But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.
Wildlife: Hammerhead Sharks – ‘Insane Biology’
The hammerhead sharks are a group of sharks that form the family Sphyrnidae, so named for the unusual and distinctive structure of their heads, which are flattened and laterally extended into a “hammer” shape called a cephalofoil.
TOP JOURNALS: RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS FROM SCIENCE MAGAZINE (APRIL 30, 2021)
Science Podcast: Storing Wind As Gravity Batteries, Donkeys Digging Wells
Contributing Correspondent Cathleen O’Grady joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a company that stores renewable energy by hoisting large objects in massive “gravity batteries.”
Also on this week’s show, Erick Lundgren, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, talks about how water from wells dug by wild horses and feral donkeys provides a buffer to all different kinds of animals and plants during the driest times in the Sonora and Mojave deserts.
Theorectical Physics: The ‘Constructor Theory’ Of Oxford’s Chiara Marletto
“Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible,” writes the physicist Chiara Marletto. “Bizarre as it may seem, it is commonplace in quantum physics.”
Chiara Marletto is trying to build a master theory — a set of ideas so fundamental that all other theories would spring from it. Her first step: Invoke the impossible.
Constructor Theory is a new approach to formulating fundamental laws in physics. Instead of describing the world in terms of trajectories, initial conditions and dynamical laws, in constructor theory laws are about which physical transformations are possible and which are impossible, and why. This powerful switch has the potential to bring all sorts of interesting fields, currently regarded as inherently approximative, into fundamental physics. These include the theories of information, knowledge, thermodynamics, and life.
Read more about Marletto and David Deutsch’s constructor theory at Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-to…
Medicine: ‘How Vaccines Actually Work’ (Video)
Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease, and they have been saving human lives for hundreds of years. Vaccines are medicines that train the body to defend itself against future disease.
Boomers Daily 