Just when you thought that Vantablack is the blackest material known to science, another comes in to take its place. Researchers just unveiled “a material that takes black to a whole new level of blackness.”

The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a little like a fuzzy forest of tiny trees, according to the team behind the project.

The CNT material is stated to absorb over 99.995 of incoming light, which is greater than the 99.96 percent that Vantablack can absorb.

"In other words, it reflected 10 times less light than all other superblack materials, including Vantablack," explains an MIT release.

The amazing thing about this is this was discovered by accident, just like some of the best scientific discoveries. Check out the story over at ScienceAlert.

(Image Credit: R. Capanna / A. Berlato / A. Pinato/ ScienceAlert)

Going inside any startup or university lab where quantum computers are being constructed is like time traveling to the 1960s, the time of mainframe computing. Inside these labs are groups of technicians managing the machines the size of entire rooms.

Each kind of equipment, ranging from super-accurate lasers to supercooled refrigerators, is needed in harnessing the forces of quantum mechanics for data processing.

Cables connecting various bits of gear form multicolored spaghetti that spills over floors and runs across ceilings. Physicists and engineers swarm around banks of screens, constantly monitoring and tweaking the performance of the computers.

Mainframes ushered in the information revolution, and the hope is that quantum computers will prove game-changers too. Their immense processing power promises to outstrip that of even the most capable conventional supercomputers, potentially delivering advances in everything from drug discovery to materials science and artificial intelligence.

The huge challenge in this developing industry, however, is creating machines which can be scaled up both reliably and relatively cheaply.

Generating and managing the quantum bits, or qubits, that carry information in the computers is hard. Even the tiniest vibrations or changes in temperature—phenomena known as “noise” in quantum jargon—can cause qubits to lose their fragile quantum state. And when that happens, errors creep into calculations.

The common response to this problem is to create quantum computers with as many qubits as possible on a single chip. However, the error rates become extreme. The largest chips of today have fewer than a hundred qubits, but if scientists want to produce the same result as a single error-free qubit, thousands or even tens of thousands of qubits would be needed. What’s more, since each qubit needs its own control wiring, the system becomes more complex and more difficult to manage as more qubits are added. Not only does the system become more complex; it also becomes more costly.

A Yale professor named Robert Schoelkopf, believes that there is a better way to approach this challenge. Instead of trying to pack lots of qubits onto a single chip, Quantum Circuits, a startup which Schoelkopf started in 2017, is developing mini quantum machines which “can be networked together via specialized interfaces, a bit like very high-tech Lego bricks.”

Schoelkopf says this approach helps produce lower error rates, so fewer qubits—and therefore less supporting hardware—will be needed to create powerful quantum machines.

Find out more about this topic over at Technology Review.

(Image Credit: Quantum Circuits)

We all know the strict set of rules for a proper game of hide-and-seek. For example, midway through the game, the “seeker” cannot switch to become a “hider”, and hiders should stay put until they’re found.

Scientists through this study have discovered that lab rats can play hide-and-seek properly. What’s more, these rats seem to enjoy playing the game with people.

Neuroscientist Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin got the idea for his experiment from YouTube. “There are all these YouTube videos from pet owners that say their animals love to do this,” he says. Although it’s well known that rats play lots of rough-and-tumble games, hide-and-seek is so much more elaborate that Brecht wondered whether they could really do it.

See more of this study over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: sibya/ Pixabay)

It’s been about 2 decades ever since the time when we still had to use 3.5” floppy disks for almost everything computer-related. Now that those days are gone, what do we do with the floppy disks that we have at home?

When Paul Strauss of Technabob realized that he had no more use of his floppy disks, he thought that they would make good drink coasters. Unfortunately for him, the moisture got inside the disks, and the disks scratched his coffee table. 

Fortunately, someone had the same idea as Strauss, but he made sure that no moisture would get in the disks, and the coffee table safe from scratches.

TechnoChic makes these fun retro coasters from old floppies which have been covered in vinyl, then backed with cork.

You can grab a set of five floppy coasters over on TechnoChic’s Etsy shop for $25. They’re also available in colors if you’re looking for something a little more vibrant.

(Image Credit: Technochic/ Technabob)

Neonicotinoid is the most widely used pesticide in the world. It has been implicated to have caused the dropping of bee populations, and now new research suggests another harmful effect of the pesticide, this time on birds.

… [The pesticide] could also have a hand in the decline of songbird populations across North America. From 1966 to 2013, the populations of nearly three-quarters of farmland bird species across the continent have precipitously dropped.

When the researchers fed some of the birds seeds coated with neonicotinoids, this is what happened.

Within hours, the dosed birds began to lose weight and ate less food, researchers report in the Sept. 13 Science. Birds given the higher amount of imidacloprid (3.9 milligrams per kilogram of body mass) lost 6 percent of their body mass within six hours. That’s about 1.6 grams for an average bird weighing 27 grams. Tracking the birds (Zonotrichia leucophrys) revealed that the pesticide-treated sparrows also lagged behind the others when continuing their migration to their summer mating grounds.

Find out more about the study over at ScienceNews.

(Image Credit: M. Eng/ ScienceNews)

Life on Earth is, indeed, something wonderful. It is diverse and it displays striking geographical global patterns in biodiversity. But what determines these global patterns? This has been the question of scientists ever since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace, and despite over 200 years worth of study, this has remained unanswered.

Published this week on September 13, a pair of companion papers found out that mountain regions, especially the mountains in the tropics, “are hotspots of extraordinary and baffling richness.” However, this also begs the question why mountains become hotspots of biodiversity, and scientists looked deeper into the matter.

Find out more over at EurekAlert.

(Image Credit: Jesper Sonne/CMEC)

NASA is giving its best in getting its new, moon-bound rocket and spacecraft ready for its next space mission, Artemis 1, which aims to eventually land people on the lunar surface. The new video from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center goes in detail through the new Space Launch System (SLS), piece by piece, from top to bottom. The SLS is the rocket expected to bring astronauts to the Moon, and spacecraft faraway places in our Solar System, like Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

Watch the video over at Space.com.

(Image Credit: Tyler Martin/NASA)

Taking a photo of a lightning takes extreme patience and high-tech camera equipment. However, successfully capturing lightning is well worth it.

Now, researchers also capture lightning, but using a method way different than photography. It turns out that lightning can be used to shed light on storm cell behavior, which gives forecasters new tools for predicting lightning hazards, as this new study showed.

The new technique is "essentially lightning-based tomography, similar to a medical X-ray," said Michael Peterson, an atmospheric physicist at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico and author of the new study, published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

"Using lightning flashes as the light source, we can identify contrasts in cloud layers that are indicative of dense regions, such as ones that might be laden with hail," he said.

Peterson drew upon data gathered by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) on NOAA's GOES satellites. The GLM was designed to measure total lightning activity and provide that data to forecasters in real-time, but the products used in operations are only a small portion of GLM's capabilities.

[...]

This deeper dive into the GLM data can also help identify storm systems that may produce especially dangerous lightning, like horizontal flashes that can seem to strike out of the blue, Peterson said.

More details of this one over at PHYS.org.

(Image Credit: WKIDESIGN/ Pixabay)

Online disinformation is a rampant problem on the Internet, and the best solution against it is an informed society which thinks critically. In other words, society must be educated. However, the problem here is that “there are no shortcuts to universal education.” Thankfully, there are institutions who try to help in making the process faster.

Enter Finnish Public Broadcasting Company, Yle, which is hoping to harness the engagement power of gamification to accelerate awareness and understanding of troll tactics and help more people spot malicious Internet fakes. It’s put together an online game, called Troll Factory, that lets you play at being, well, a hateful troll. Literally.

[...]

Yle, which is a not-for-profit public service broadcaster with a remit to educate and inform, released a Finnish version of the troll factory game back in May but decided to follow up with this international version (in English) after the game got such a strong local reception, including being picked up by people in natsec and education to use as an educational resource, according to Jarno Koponen, head of AI & personalization, at Yle Uutiset News Lab.

Check out TechCrunch for more details about the game.

What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: TechCrunch)

Far Rockaway, Queens — This woman was surrounded by her family at Beach Gardens Rehab and Nursing Center as she celebrated her 112th birthday on Thursday. 

The woman, Ermisna Theodore, came to the US from Haiti. Theodore has five sons and dozens of grandkids, not to mention her many great grandchildren.

What’s her secret to old age? Find out on Pix11.

(Image Credit: Pix11)

John Douglas, also known as Jacksfilms, has been releasing iPhone parodies for every single phone release ever since the time of iPhone 3Gs.

With the recent release of the iPhone 11, it is to be expected that Jacksfilms will eventually release a parody of the phone, which he already did.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Via Mashable

(Video Credit: jacksfilms/ YouTube)

A new study published online recently in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance suggests that distractions may alter our perception of what’s real, “making us believe we saw something different from what we actually saw.”

Worse, the study also suggests that people may not be aware that their perception was already altered. Rather, they might feel great confidence in what they believe they saw.

“We wanted to find out what happens if you’re trying to pay attention to one thing and something else interferes,” said Julie Golomb, senior author and associate professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. “Our visual environment contains way too many things for us to process in a given moment, so how do we reconcile those pressures?”

The results… indicate that, sometimes, we don’t.

“It implies that there are deeper consequences of having your attention drawn away that might actually change what you are perceiving,” said Golomb, who is director of Ohio State’s Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. “It showed us that we clearly don’t understand the full implications of distraction.”

Know more about the study at Ohio State News.

This study reminds me of how close-up magicians manipulate our perception of reality. What do you think?

(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)

Most of the materials needed to sustain our modern daily living such as fuels, pharmaceuticals, and other commodity materials, come from non-renewable resources. Since they are non-renewable, these materials would be more costly and more difficult to acquire over time as their supplies diminish. A good example of these non-renewable resources is petroleum, from which we get fuels that meet our demand for energy.

To help create a truly renewable alternative to petroleum, Michelle O’Malley, a professor of chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, has turned to one of the most abundant materials on Earth: the non-food parts of plants — stems, roots, inedible leaves — that would generally be regarded as waste. And with a $2.25 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy, O’Malley’s research group, along with collaborators at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), are poised to advance the knowledge of and technology for advanced biofuels.

“We are extremely grateful to the Department of Energy for making this award, which will fund an ambitious, high-risk/high-reward research collaboration between UC Santa Barbara and PNNL to image microbial processes that are critical for waste-to-fuel production,” O’Malley said. “There is a critical need to develop new methods to manufacture chemicals, fuels and commodity chemicals from renewable resources.”

Check out The Current for more details.

(Image Credit: PublicDomainPictures/ Pixabay)

Yale researchers in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS Biology reported that a woman’s bone marrow may dictate if a woman will be able to start and sustain pregnancy. According to the study, when the egg is fertilized, the stem cells go from the bone marrow to the uterus via traveling in the bloodstream. In the uterus, those stem cells help in transforming the uterine lining for implantation. Should the lining fail through this essential transformation, the embryo will be unable to implant, and the body will terminate the pregnancy.

“We have always known that two kind of things were necessary for pregnancy,” says Dr. Hugh Taylor, senior author and the Anita O'Keeffe Young Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at Yale. “You must have ovaries to make eggs, and you must also have a uterus to receive the embryo. But knowing that bone marrow has a significant role is a paradigm shift.”

Previous research has indicated that, in small numbers, bone marrow-derived stem cells contribute to the non-immune environment of the non-pregnant uterus, but it’s remained unknown if and how stem cells affect a pregnant uterus. In this study, the researchers were able to prove the physiological relevance of stem cells to pregnancy.

Head over to YaleNews to know more about the study.

(Image Credit: Kaz/ Pixabay)

A team of researchers will be launching a year-long trial that could tremendously help people suffering with dementia when they arrive at a hospital emergency department. The hospital emergency department is a busy and noisy place, an environment which can make a person with advanced dementia frightened and even violent.

QUT nurse researcher Dr James Hughes is about to launch a trial of a deceptively simple method to help make the emergency department experience smoother for dementia patients.

“They’re very simple kits, they have things in them like a puzzle, sudoku and word puzzles, some colouring, some activity devices, we have some music in there that’s generationally appropriate,” Dr Hughes said.

“There’s nothing in these packs that you couldn’t find at your local Woolworths or Big W, so putting them together or even tailoring them to the local population could happen almost immediately.”

More details of this trial over at The Sydney Morning Herald.

(Image Credit: GDJ/ Pixabay)