Science - CO2 adsorption and more resistant crops

Graphene making headlines again, first as a supplement to concrete to strengthen it. Stronger concrete, less concrete, less steel, less CO2. Then, graphene found locked in with diamond forming structures in a meteorite never seen before. Value - structure characteristics would presumably allow for high speed battery charging and now tha tthey know what they look like and can estimate what conditions formed them they can work on replicating them.

The super material reinforcing rinks, cars and buildings - BBC News

"By adding as little as 0.1% graphene into cement and aggregate, you can potentially use less material to get the same performance," explains Mr Baker. Reducing the amount of concrete used in construction for instance by 30%, could lower global CO2 emissions by 2-3%, he estimates.

Besides the roller disco, Mr Baker and his colleagues have also trialled the graphene-infused concrete, known as concretene, in a gym floor in Wiltshire and some road projects, including a section of the A1 several hundred metres long in Northumberland.

The team will also pour concretene in an as-yet undisclosed project in the United Arab Emirates this year.

These early trials have comprised fairly straightforward projects, Mr Baker explains - floor slabs, rather than walls or elevated platforms, which might be more risky. So far, the concrete has performed as expected, though.


Strange, never-before-seen diamond crystal structure found inside 'Diablo canyon' meteorite (msn.com)

While studying lonsdaleite in the meteorite, the researchers found something odd. Instead of the pure hexagonal structures they were expecting, the researchers found growths of another carbon-based material called graphene interlocking with the diamond. These growths are known as diaphites, and inside the meteorite, they form in a particularly intriguing layered pattern. In between these layers are "stacking faults," which mean the layers don't line up perfectly, the researchers said in a statement.

Finding diaphites in the meteoritic lonsdaleite suggests that this material can be found in other carbonaceous material, the scientists wrote in the study, which means it could be readily available to use as a resource. The finding also gives the researchers a better sense of the pressures and temperatures needed to create the structure.

Graphene is made of a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, arranged in hexagons. Although research on this material is still ongoing, the material has many potential applications. Because it is both as light as a feather and as strong as a diamond; both transparent and highly conductive; and 1 million times thinner than a human hair, it could one day be used for more targeted medicines, tinier electronics with lighting-fast charging speeds, or faster and bendier technology, the researchers said.

And now that researchers have discovered these graphene growths inside meteorites, it's possible to learn more about how they form — and thus how to make them in the lab. "Through the controlled layer growth of structures, it should be possible to design materials that are both ultra-hard and also ductile, as well as have adjustable electronic properties from a conductor to an insulator," Christoph Salzmann, a chemist at University College London and co-author of a paper describing the research, said in the statement.

 

MIT boffins make AI chips '1 million times faster than the synapses in the human brain' (msn.com)

A team at MIT reports that it has built AI chips that mimic synapses, but are a million times faster, and are additionally massively more energy efficient than current designs. The inorganic material is also easy to fit into current chip-building kit.

"Once you have an analog processor, you will no longer be training networks everyone else is working on. You will be training networks with unprecedented complexities that no one else can afford to, and therefore vastly outperform them all. In other words, this is not a faster car, this is a spacecraft," said lead author and MIT postdoc Murat Onen.

"The speed certainly was surprising. Normally, we would not apply such extreme fields across devices, in order to not turn them into ash. But instead, protons ended up shuttling at immense speeds across the device stack, specifically a million times faster compared to what we had before. And this movement doesn't damage anything, thanks to the small size and low mass of protons. It is almost like teleporting."

 

@ncargat1 is this material advance / chip breakthrough as monumental as it sounds?

 

Thanks. Does the fact that it is MIT reporting it and they noted that it could be easily incorporated into the existing chip making process mean anything? And it appears they already have plans to integrate it to use with AI.

 

thanks. how does that reconcile with this statement from the development team? Are they just being overly optimistic

The inorganic material is also easy to fit into current chip-building kit.

here are other articles on it

MIT Discovers New Material for Processors — Semiconductors Better Than Silicon? | Tech Times

MIT Discovers Semiconductor That Can Perform Far Better Than Silicon (scitechdaily.com)

hopefully these new build chip plants are able to take advantage of this significant advance in materials

 

Thanks, the whole thing is baffling to me that things can be built at that scale. hopefully some of the new chip factories being constructed will be able to incorporate the latest materials in the process of designing and building their new plants.

 

Should such capital intensive projects be designed to be adaptable for material advantages if SI capacity is reaching 100%? Is that possible?

WRT the funding, it is my understanding that most of that is taxes that would not have been collected, it isnt payment from taxpayer to company. In real estate is it Tax Incremental Financing. TIF is also one way to help fund affordable housing.

 

Understood. We could either slap tariffs on chips made elsewhere or we could provide offsetting income to get critical infrastructure here. National defense..Russia is running out of chips for smart weapons and has no capacity to build their own. That is making a big difference in their ability to accurately target long range targets. We need that capacity onshore

 

the main article is re: using lasers to make zbits act differently. Lab technique with potential to helps stabilize quantum computing by creating a new form of matter. Buried deeper in the article is something I had not seen before. Makes one wonder if parallel dimensions are a real possibility

New phase of matter could protect quantum computers against errors (msn.com)

The new research comes just months after a series of studies into time crystals, a phase of matter which repeats in time, similar to how a regular crystal's structure repeats in space. What that means is that the particles in the crystal perpetually switch between two states without requiring the input of more energy and without losing any energy.

These crystals are the first objects to break what is known as "time-translation symmetry," a rule in physics that says that a stable object will remain unchanged throughout time. Time crystals avoid this rule, being both stable and ever-changing.

So, for example, ice when stable will remain ice and will only change when temperature or another factor makes it unstable. A time crystal would change even when in its ground state, acting differently than all other phases of matter.

Last year, scientists from Stanford and the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems, as well as scientists at QuTech, a collaboration between the Delft University of Technology and the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO), figured out for the first time how to create these theoretical crystals.

In June, scientists from Lancaster University, Royal Holloway London, Landau Institute and Aalto University in Helsinki succeeded in linking two-time crystals in a two-level quantum system, in which two independent quantum states were able to occupy both states simultaneously.

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