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The World’s Smartest SupercomputerIBM and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laborat

The World’s Smartest Supercomputer

IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently unveiled the world’s smartest, most powerful supercomputer, called Summit. At peak performance it can run 200 quadrillion calculations per second, or, in other words, if every person on Earth completed one calculation per second, it would take the world population 305 days to do what Summit can do in 1 second. Summit was built to meet the data-centric demands of the AI era, which can optimize the amount of simulation that needs to be done for faster results. Summit was designed with over 30 applications in mind, and it’s unveiling helps bring the computer industry even closer to supercomputing at scale.

Learn more about Summit here ->


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Mainframe mastersWith mainframes storing a significant portion of the world’s data and acting as the

Mainframe masters

With mainframes storing a significant portion of the world’s data and acting as the backup system for most businesses, mainframe coders are in high demand. Master the Mainframe is a virtual coding competition sponsored by the IBM Z Academic Initiative in which high school and college students put their mainframe-specific programming skills to the test tackling real-world problems. This year, college student Anna McKee made history as the first woman to win the competition. The competition gives employers a firsthand look at some of the best young coders out there, and helps companies connect with––and hire––talented students via a new program called Talent Match.

Learn more about Master the Mainframe ->


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Rockin’ out IBM researchers have made a new breakthrough in the study of nanoparticles. Because of n

Rockin’ out

IBM researchers have made a new breakthrough in the study of nanoparticles. Because of nanoparticles’ naturally erratic movement and small size (about 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair), they’re notoriously difficult to separate and control – and study. IBM researchers created a motor device for sorting, separating and moving nanoparticles without the need for water, which could eventually lead to lab-on-a-chip applications. Using a “rocking” motion and oscillating electrical field across the nano-landscape, the device can more precisely separate nanoparticle populations; a model suggests that it can separate nanoparticles ranging from 5 nanometers (nm) to 100 nm. This technology has major implications in the fields of material science, environmental science and biochemistry, such as potentially helping eradicate drinking water pollutants.

Learn more about rocking Brownian motors ->


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One giant leap for mankind Today, we celebrate the 49th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest ac

One giant leap for mankind

Today, we celebrate the 49th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest achievements: the Apollo 11 moon landing. On July 20, 1969, the first human walked on the moon. IBM is proud to have worked on all the Apollo lunar missions. Thousands of IBM administrators, engineers and technicians contributed both software, hardware and expertise to help ensure each mission’s success. And IBM is always looking forward, working to develop technologies to help prepare humanity for the next frontier.

Learn more about the Apollo missions ->


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Brain-Inspired Computing Is ComingA computer inspired by the human brain…is it possible? IBM

Brain-Inspired Computing Is Coming

A computer inspired by the human brain…is it possible? IBM is part of a team helping to make this ambitious goal a reality. Together with EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, IBM Research has developed a new type of computing architecture inspired by the brain, using a technology known as a “memristive device.” These chips increase the precision associated with synaptic operations without increasing power, helping the computer process complex calculations at a level that approaches the brain’s own synaptic architecture—all without drawing too much power and overheating. There’s still a lot of progress to be made, but this research is a meaningful step towards a long-term goal: computers whose processing power could give our own neurons and synapses a run for their money.

Explore the ins and outs of how neuromorphic tech works ->


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myjetpack:For @newscientistofficial#tomgauld #cartoon #science #sciencepark

myjetpack:

For @newscientistofficial
#tomgauld #cartoon #science #sciencepark


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scientificillustration: bonedahlia:hrokr:Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben scientificillustration: bonedahlia:hrokr:Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben scientificillustration: bonedahlia:hrokr:Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben scientificillustration: bonedahlia:hrokr:Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben scientificillustration: bonedahlia:hrokr:Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben

scientificillustration:

bonedahlia:

hrokr:

Three dog skulls from ‘Secrets of Bones’ hosted by Ben Garrod. The first image shows a regular dog skull; this contains both collagen, an organic compound, and calcium phosphate, a mineral compound.

In the images with the red gloves, another skull has been left in an oven for a few days. This has taken out all of the organic compounds, leaving just the mineral compounds. As you can see, this bone is too brittle to be of structural use.

In the images with the blue gloves, a skull has been soaked in formic acid for over a month. This removed the calcium phosphate from the bone but leaves the collagen. The surprising result is a very flexible skull.

Whaaaat. That is awesome.

If you haven’t seen ‘Secrets of Bones’ I’d highly recommend it. Here are links to the episodes on YouTube:

S01 E01 Size Matters

S01 E02 Down To Earth

S01 E03 Into The Air

S01 E04 Sensing The World

S01E05 Food For Thought


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whatevergreen:

“… “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.

“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” …”

 Researchers present new strategy for extending ductility in a single-phase alloySimultaneous high s

Researchers present new strategy for extending ductility in a single-phase alloy

Simultaneous high strength and large ductility are always desirable for metallic materials. However, while the strength of metals and alloys can be easily increased by five to 15 times through simple plastic deformation or grain refinement down to the nano-scale, the gain in strength is usually accompanied by a drastic loss of uniform ductility. Ductility depends strongly on the work hardening ability, which becomes weak in materials with high strength, especially in a single-phase material.

Publishing online in PNAS, the research group of Prof. WU Xiaolei at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Prof. En Ma at Johns Hopkins University, U.S., have demonstrated a strategy for exploiting a dynamically reinforced multilevel heterogeneous grain structure (HGS). They demonstrated the behavior of such an HGS using the face-centered-cubic CrCoNi medium-entropy alloy (MEA) as a model system.

Back stress hardening is usually not obvious in single-phase homogeneous grains. To overcome this, the scientists purposely created an unusually heterogeneous grain structure. They took advantage of the low stacking fault energy of the MEA, which facilitates the generation of twinned nano-grains and stacking faults during tensile straining, dynamically reinforcing the heterogeneity on the fly.

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 Recreating the chameleon: Material mimics color changes of living organismsResearchers at Nagoya Un

Recreating the chameleon: Material mimics color changes of living organisms

Researchers at Nagoya University develop a composite material that, by adjusting its composition and exposing it to different types of light, can mimic animals’ changes in color.

Nagoya, Japan – A range of creatures, including chameleons, octopuses, and frogs, can change color in response to changes in the environment. Some insights into the mechanisms behind this at the anatomical, cellular, and molecular levels have been obtained. However, much work is still required to obtain sufficient understanding of this phenomenon and to translate it into useful artificial applications.

As reported in the journal Small, researchers at Nagoya University’s Department of Molecular Design and Engineering developed a material containing dyes and crystals that can change the colors and patterns it displays depending on the background color used within it and its exposure to visible or ultraviolet light.

The team was inspired to develop this material by findings obtained in the skin of certain frogs, in which different layers of cells with different properties combine to enable remarkable color changes.

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 Fine-tuning chemistry by doping with transition metals produced stability in bismuth oxideANSTO has

Fine-tuning chemistry by doping with transition metals produced stability in bismuth oxide

ANSTO has contributed to research led by the University of Sydney, involving doping transition metals in a polymorph of bismuth oxide in a search for more structural stability.

Cubic high-temperature polymorph of bismuth oxide, δ-Bi2O3, is the best known oxide ionic conductor but its narrow stability range (729—817 °C), which is close to its melting temperature of 817 °C precludes its practical use.

A large collaboration, led by Professor Chris Ling and Dr. Julia Wind (as part of her Ph.D.) from the University of Sydney involving researchers from ANSTO and two other universities, has achieved the design and understanding of the complex crystal structure and chemistry behind a commensurate structure within the fast-ion conducting stabilised bismuth oxide, co-doped with chromium and niobium, Bi23CrNb3O45.

The study was published in the Chemistry of Materials.

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materialsworld:

Heated magnetic nanoparticles may be the future of eradicating cancer cells without harming healthy tissue, according to research from the University of Buffalo, USA. The nanoparticles strike tumours with significant heat under a low magnetic field.

Hao Zeng, Professor of Physics at Buffalo, said, ‘The main accomplishment of our work is the greatly enhanced heating performance of nanoparticles under low-field conditions suitable for clinical applications. The best heating power we obtained is close to the theoretical limit, greatly surpassing some of the best performing particles that other research teams have produced.’

Targeting technologies would first direct nanoparticles to tumours within the patient’s body. Exposure to an alternating magnetic field would prompt the particles’ magnetic orientation to flip back and forth hundreds of thousands of times a second, causing them to warm up as they absorb energy from the electromagnetic field and convert it to thermal energy.

Two particles have been tested – manganese-cobalt-ferrite and zinc ferrite. While the manganese particle reached maximum heating power under high magnetic fields, the biocompatible zinc ferrite was efficieny under an ultra-low field.

While this form of treatment, known as magnetic nanoparticle hyperthermia, is not new, the Buffalo-designed particles are able to generate heat several times faster than the current standard.

 Superstrong Al alloys may change manufacturing processes for automobiles, aerospace devicesPurdue U

Superstrong Al alloys may change manufacturing processes for automobiles, aerospace devices

Purdue University researchers have developed a superstrong material that may change some manufacturing processes for the aerospace and automobile industries.

The Purdue team, led by Xinghang Zhang, a professor in Purdue’s School of Materials Engineering, created high-strength aluminum alloy coatings. According to Zhang, there is an increasing demand for such materials because of their advantages for automakers and aerospace industries.

“We have created a very durable and lightweight aluminum alloy that is just as strong as, and possibly stronger than, stainless steel,” Zhang said. “Our aluminum alloy is lightweight and provides flexibility that stainless steel does not in many applications.”

Another member of the Purdue team, Yifan Zhang, a graduate student in materials engineering, said the aluminum alloy they created could be used for making wear- and corrosion-resistant automobile parts such as engines and coatings for optical lenses for specialized telescopes in the aerospace industry.

Read more.


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 Sintering atomically thin materials with ceramics now possibleFor the first time, researchers have

Sintering atomically thin materials with ceramics now possible

For the first time, researchers have created a nanocomposite of ceramics and a two-dimensional material, opening the door for new designs of nanocomposites with such applications as solid-state batteries, thermoelectrics, varistors, catalysts, chemical sensors and much more.

Sintering uses high heat to compact powder materials into a solid form. Widely used in industry, ceramic powders are typically compacted at temperatures of 1472 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. Many low-dimensional materials cannot survive at those temperatures.

But a sintering process developed by a team of researchers at Penn State, called the cold sintering process (CSP), can sinter ceramics at much lower temperatures, less than 572 degrees F, saving energy and enabling a new form of material with high commercial potential.

“We have industry people who are already very interested in this work,” said Jing Guo, a post-doctoral scholar working in the group of Clive Randall, professor of materials science and engineering, Penn State. “They are interested in developing some new material applications with this system and, in general, using CSP to sinter nanocomposites.” Guo is first coauthor on the paper appearing online in Advanced Materials.

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 Thermal camouflage disguises hot and coldHunters don camouflage clothing to blend in with their sur

Thermal camouflage disguises hot and cold

Hunters don camouflage clothing to blend in with their surroundings. But thermal camouflage – or the appearance of being the same temperature as one’s environment – is much more difficult. Now researchers, reporting in ACS’ journal Nano Letters, have developed a system that can reconfigure its thermal appearance to blend in with varying temperatures in a matter of seconds.

Most state-of-the-art night-vision devices are based on thermal imaging. Thermal cameras detect infrared radiation emitted by an object, which increases with the object’s temperature. When viewed through a night-vision device, humans and other warm-blooded animals stand out against the cooler background. Previously, scientists have tried to develop thermal camouflage for various applications, but they have encountered problems such as slow response speed, lack of adaptability to different temperatures and the requirement for rigid materials. Coskun Kocabas and coworkers wanted to develop a fast, rapidly adaptable and flexible material.

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 New insights bolster Einstein’s idea about how heat moves through solidsA discovery by scient

New insights bolster Einstein’s idea about how heat moves through solids

A discovery by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a century-old theory by Albert Einstein that explains how heat moves through everything from travel mugs to engine parts.

The transfer of heat is fundamental to all materials. This new research, published in the journal Science, explored thermal insulators, which are materials that block transmission of heat.

“We saw evidence for what Einstein first proposed in 1911—that heat energy hops randomly from atom to atom in thermal insulators,” said Lucas Lindsay, materials theorist at ORNL. “The hopping is in addition to the normal heat flow through the collective vibration of atoms.”

The random energy hopping is not noticeable in materials that conduct heat well, like copper on the bottom of saucepans during cooking, but may be detectable in solids that are less able to transmit heat.

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 Simple logic for nanofluidic computing simulatedInvigorating the idea of computers based on fluids

Simple logic for nanofluidic computing simulated

Invigorating the idea of computers based on fluids instead of silicon, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have shown how computational logic operations could be performed in a liquid medium by simulating the trapping of ions (charged atoms) in graphene (a sheet of carbon atoms) floating in saline solution. The scheme might also be used in applications such as water filtration, energy storage or sensor technology.

The idea of using a liquid medium for computing has been around for decades, and various approaches have been proposed. Among its potential advantages, this approach would require very little material and its soft components could conform to custom shapes in, for example, the human body.

NIST’s ion-based transistor and logic operations are simpler in concept than earlier proposals. The new simulations show that a special film immersed in liquid can act like a solid silicon-based semiconductor. For example, the material can act like a transistor, the switch that carries out digital logic operations in a computer. The film can be switched on and off by tuning voltage levels like those induced by salt concentrations in biological systems.

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 Oxide sintering by air pressure controlProfessor Hiromi Nakano of the Toyohashi University of Techn

Oxide sintering by air pressure control

Professor Hiromi Nakano of the Toyohashi University of Technology has collaborated with a company to develop a small, lightweight air-pressure control atmosphere furnace that can rapidly and uniformly synthesize periodical structures of Li2O-Nb2O5-TiO2 (LNT) solid solution materials at 3x ordinary pressure. The underlying mechanism was discovered using detailed composition/structure analysis. As the sintering process is reduced by one-fourth compared to conventional electric furnaces, this technology can also be applied to other materials.

The air-pressure control atmosphere furnace is a sintering furnace that uses a regular 100 V AC power outlet and saves up to 800 W of energy. With this furnace, pressurized gas is supplied/controlled using a compressor or gas flow and materials can be heated up to 1,100 degrees C. (FIG. 1)

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cncenginedynamics: In my endless quest for the perfectly machined paper weight I came up with this.

cncenginedynamics:

In my endless quest for the perfectly machined paper weight I came up with this. From one solid piece of T6 6061 billet aluminum. These are not seperate cubes put inside one another,it was all machined as a whole,the inner cubes do not come out.


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Alloys: 6061 AluminumAmong the most popular aluminum alloys, 6061 aluminum is an alloy in the 6000 sAlloys: 6061 AluminumAmong the most popular aluminum alloys, 6061 aluminum is an alloy in the 6000 sAlloys: 6061 AluminumAmong the most popular aluminum alloys, 6061 aluminum is an alloy in the 6000 sAlloys: 6061 AluminumAmong the most popular aluminum alloys, 6061 aluminum is an alloy in the 6000 s

Alloys: 6061 Aluminum

Among the most popular aluminum alloys, 6061 aluminum is an alloy in the 6000 series of aluminum alloys: those heat treatable alloys where the principle alloying elements are magnesium and silicon. Because it is so popular, 6061 aluminum is also one of the least expensive of the aluminum alloys.

Highly resistant to corrosion, this alloy can be tempered a variety of different ways to achieve the desirable properties. Different tempers can alter the workability, weldability, and strength. T6 is one of the most common tempers (solution heat treated and artificially aged), but other tempers include O (annealed), T1 (cooled from elevated temperature shaping process and naturally aged), and T4 (solution heat-treated and naturally aged).

6061 aluminum is composed of over 95% aluminum with small or trace amounts of silicon, iron, copper, manganese, magnesium, chromium, zinc, and titanium added in. Magnesium is the largest alloying element, at up to 1.2% maximum, followed by silicon at 0.80% maximum. It is very often extruded but is also suitable for hot forging. 

While not as high strength as some of the other aluminum alloys, 6061 is still highly versatile and used in a wide variety of applications: railway car components; boat or aircraft structures; other structural components such as bridges; pipes; wheels; cans; and SCUBA tanks.

Sources/Further Reading: (1) ( 2 - image 2 ) (3) (4) (5)

Image sources: (1) (3) (4)


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