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[Unknown Quantity]

Thought we needed a place for all the science news stories. A lot of exciting news and advancements and we need to stay informed.

I'll start with the two that inspired this thread :

The energy shortage and clean water scarcity are two key challenges for global sustainable development. Near half of the total global water withdrawals is consumed by power generation plants while water desalination consumes lots of electricity. Here, we demonstrate a photovoltaics-membrane distillation (PV-MD) device that can stably produce clean water (>1.64 kg·m−2·h−1) from seawater while simultaneously having uncompromised electricity generation performance (>11%) under one Sun irradiation. Its high clean water production rate is realized by constructing multi stage membrane distillation (MSMD) device at the backside of the solar cell to recycle the latent heat of water vapor condensation in each distillation stage. This composite device can significantly reduce capital investment costs by sharing the same land and the same mounting system and thus represents a potential possibility to transform an electricity power plant from otherwise a water consumer to a fresh water producer.

Full published paper (highly recommend a peruse).

Simultaneous production of fresh water and electricity via multistage solar photovoltaic membrane distillation - Nature Communications

The increasing demand for energy and clean water has become a grand global challenge. Here the authors develop a membrane-distillation device that exploits sunlight and the heat dissipated by an integrated solar cell unit, enabling simultaneous efficient production of electricity and drinkable...

www.nature.com

The potential for this could be amazing.

A Japanese spacecraft has successfully landed on a distant asteroid where it hopes to collect samples that could shed light on the evolution of the solar system.

Scientists at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) observing the landing from a control room on the southern island of Tanegashima applauded and made “V” for victory signs after the Hayabusa2 probe landed on the asteroid on Thursday morning local time.

“The touchdown is successful,” Jaxa spokesman Takayuki Tomobe said.

The agency said the probe had been working normally above Ryugu asteroid, some 300m km (185m miles) from Earth.

Its landing is the second time the probe has touched down on the desolate asteroid as part of a complex mission that has also involved sending rovers and robots.

Source

The Japanese collecting samples from an asteroid 300m km away is awesome, some of it organic and has been dormant for over 4bn years.

Please post & discuss the science here GAF.

Call me a flat earther if old.

 

[Shadowplay1979]

I want sheriff robot poker players with cowboy hats

Artificial intelligence has now pretty much conquered poker

A new artificial intelligence called Pluribus is a real card shark at six-player no-limit Texas Hold’em.

www.sciencenews.org

 

[Chittagong]

I want sheriff robot poker players with cowboy hats

Artificial intelligence has now pretty much conquered poker

A new artificial intelligence called Pluribus is a real card shark at six-player no-limit Texas Hold’em.

www.sciencenews.org

Saw this, wondered if it means an end to online poker as we know it

 

[Shadowplay1979]

Saw this, wondered if it means an end to online poker as we know it

Give it a quite few more years and itll be the end of Poker in Vegas, or at least the way the game is monitored and evaluated will drastically change. Imagine having your own personal robotic rainman packed away in a chip.

 

[Unknown Quantity]

Clinical trial helps bring sight to the blind

In collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles and Second Sight, Baylor College of Medicine is testing the Orion in the first-ever FDA-approved...

www.bcm.edu

Bionic Eyes bring sight to blind people. What's next?

A material way to make Mars habitable

Silica aerogel could warm the Martian surface similar to the way greenhouse gasses keep Earth warm

www.seas.harvard.edu

We're getting closer.

 

[Unknown Quantity]

An Australian research team led by the renowned quantum physicist Prof Michelle Simmons has announced a major breakthrough in quantum computing, which researchers hope could lead to much greater computing power within a decade.

Simmons, a former Australian of the Year, and her team at the University of New South Wales announced in a paper published in Nature journal on Thursday that they have been able to achieve the first two-qubit gate between atom qubits in silicon, allowing them to communicate with each other at a 200 times faster rate than previously achieved at 0.8 nanoseconds.

A qubit is a quantum bit. In this design, it is built from single phosphorus atoms in silicon. In standard computing, a bit can exist in one of two states – 1 or 0. For qubits, it can be 1 or 0 or both simultaneously, which is referred to as a superposition.

By being able to exist in both states simultaneously, the qubit can solve problems much faster than bits. This allows for much faster processing than current computers, meaning complex problems can be solved much more quickly.

Quantum leap from Australian research promises super-fast computing power

‘Ruthlessly systematic’ research achieves qubit communication 200 times faster than ever before

www.theguardian.com

Published paper

A two-qubit gate between phosphorus donor electrons in silicon - Nature

A fast, high-fidelity two-qubit exchange gate between phosphorus donor electron spin qubits in silicon is demonstrated by creating a tunable exchange interaction between two electrons bound to phosphorus atom qubits.

www.nature.com

Results in the paper and applications of the technology in the next ten years.

 

[Unknown Quantity]

Team IDs Spoken Words and Phrases in Real Time from Brain’s Speech Signals

UCSF scientists have for the first time decoded spoken words and phrases in real time from the brain signals that control speech.

www.ucsf.edu

Still early but some of the applications are great. E. G. Using it to speak to comatose patients and getting their input on how to proceed sounds awesome. A machine that can read your mind for other purposes has so many sinister possibilities it's scary (tin foil hat maybe in my future).

 

[Avasarala]

Something something protected from unlawful search and seizure....

 

[Helios]