Science & TechnologyS


Die

China betting on next-generation chip production despite US curbs - FT

CPU, electronics, chips
© Getty Images
Chinese chipmakers expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year despite US attempts to hinder the Asian nation's technological advancement, the Financial Times reported this week.

According to the report, citing people familiar with the matter, China's top chipmaker SMIC has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai to mass produce chips designed by Huawei. SMIC plans to use its existing stock of US and Dutch-made equipment to produce five-nanometer chips, the sources said.

"With the new 5nm node, Huawei is well on track to upgrade its new flagship handset and data center chips," one of the sources told FT. In September 2023, the sanctions-hit Chinese tech giant started successfully selling its Mate 60 Pro smartphone that uses high-end seven-nanometer chips.

Faced with mounting restrictions, the Chinese government has been investing heavily to develop a self-reliant semiconductor supply chain. The administration of US President Joe Biden introduced a sweeping set of export controls in 2022 aimed at slowing China's technological advance, claiming national security concerns. Among the measures was a ban on sales to China of certain semiconductor chips made anywhere in the world with US equipment, and a block on shipments of chips for supercomputing systems and artificial intelligence.

China has repeatedly criticized the export curbs, claiming that they run counter to globally recognized market rules. Last month, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said Washington's restrictions go beyond the concept of national security and destroy supply chains.

Comment: See also: China aims to boost chip production despite US restrictions - FT


Info

Colossal underwater canyon discovered near seamount deep in the Mediterranean Sea

Researchers have discovered a 33,000-foot-wide (10 kilometers) underwater canyon that was carved out of the Mediterranean seabed shortly before the sea dried up around 6 million years ago.
Underwater Canyon
© Jason Edwards via Getty ImagesA newly discovered underwater canyon was carved out of the seabed by extremely salty currents.
Scientists have discovered a giant underwater canyon in the eastern Mediterranean Sea that likely formed just before the sea transformed to a mile-high salt field.

The canyon formed around 6 million years ago, at the onset of the Messinian salinity crisis (MSC), when the Gibraltar gateway between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea narrowed and eventually pinched shut due to shifts in tectonic plates. The Mediterranean Sea became isolated from the world's oceans and dried up for roughly 700,000 years, leaving behind a vast expanse of salt up to 2 miles (3 kilometers) thick in some places.

As sea levels dropped, increasingly salty currents eroded the seabed and incised gullies several hundred feet deep along the steepest edges of the Mediterranean Sea. In a study published in the January issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers now describe a giant U-shaped canyon located 75 miles (120 km) south of Cyprus, in the depths of the Mediterranean's Levant Basin.

The 1,640-foot-deep (500 meters) and 33,000-foot-wide (10 km) canyon, which the researchers named after the nearby Eratosthenes seamount, likely formed underwater shortly before salt piled onto the seabed. Unlike the more coastal gullies, the canyon had no older "pre-salt" roots, according to the study.

Nebula

New findings from JWST: How black holes switched from creating to quenching stars

transition
© Steven Burrows/Rosemary Wyse/Mitch BegelmaThe transition in star formation rates and black hole growth as redshift decreases from regimes where positive feedback dominates to a later epoch when feedback is largely negative.
Astronomers have long sought to understand the early universe, and thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a critical piece of the puzzle has emerged. The telescope's infrared detecting "eyes" have spotted an array of small, red dots, identified as some of the earliest galaxies formed in the universe.

This surprising discovery is not just a visual marvel, it's a clue that could unlock the secrets of how galaxies and their enigmatic black holes began their cosmic journey.

JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder astrophysics professor Mitch Begelman, explains:
"The astonishing discovery from James Webb is that not only does the universe have these very compact and infrared bright objects, but they're probably regions where huge black holes already exist. That was thought to be impossible."
Begelman and a team of other astronomers, including Joe Silk, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggesting that new theories of galactic creation are needed to explain the existence of these huge black holes.

"Something new is needed to reconcile the theory of galaxy formation with the new data," elaborates Silk, the lead author of the potentially groundbreaking study.

Nuke

Nuclear fusion reaction releases almost twice the energy put in

nuclear fusion
© Fusion experiments at the US National Ignition Facility have achieved a significant milestoneFusion experiments at the US National Ignition Facility have achieved a significant milestone
The US National Ignition Facility has achieved even higher energy yields since breaking even for the first time in 2022, but a practical fusion reactor is still a long way off

Scientists have confirmed that a fusion reaction in 2022 reached a historic milestone by unleashing more energy than was put into it - and subsequent trials have produced even better results, they say. The findings, now published in a series of papers, give encouragement that fusion reactors will one day create clean, plentiful energy.

Today's nuclear power plants rely on fission reactions, where atoms are smashed apart to release energy and smaller particles. Fusion works in reverse, squeezing smaller particles together into larger atoms; the same process powers our sun.

Fusion can create more energy with none of the radioactive waste involved in fission, but finding a way to contain and control this process, let alone extract energy from it, has eluded scientists and engineers for decades.

Comment:


PCI card

China aims to boost chip production despite US restrictions - FT

Semiconductor chips, printed circuit board
© REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration/File PhotoSemiconductor chips are seen on a printed circuit board in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023.
Chinese chipmakers expect to make next-generation smartphone processors as early as this year despite U.S. efforts to curb their development of advanced technologies, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), the country's top chipmaker, has put together new semiconductor production lines in Shanghai to mass produce chips designed by Huawei, the report said, citing people familiar with the move.

SMIC is aiming to use its existing stock of U.S. and Dutch-made equipment to produce 5-nanometre chips, it added.

Huawei and SMIC did not immediately reply to Reuters' request for comment.

Info

Psychologists were sure 'climate deniers' were selfish, but a study of 4,000 showed the experts were wrong

Mystic Art
© Mystic Art Design from Pixabay
A team of psychologists were so sure "climate deniers" deceive themselves for selfish reasons that they ran three experiments with four thousand people, only to find they were completely wrong.

The researchers figured that those who do not accept that coal makes storms and floods must be motivated by their desire to keep on polluting, or flying, or feeling warm, and so they lie to themselves about the science in order to feel OK about it. (A bit like academics must do when it turns out they get paid well, but don't know their research topic at all, maybe?)

It must have been quite the shock when they were proved wrong on every single experiment. They even tried to bribe skeptics with $20 cash rewards and it still wasn't enough.
Why are people climate change deniers? Study reveals unexpected results

Do climate change deniers bend the facts to avoid having to modify their environmentally harmful behavior? Researchers from the University of Bonn and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ran an online experiment involving 4,000 US adults, and found no evidence to support this idea. The authors of the study were themselves surprised by the results.

One hypothesis is that these misconceptions are rooted in a specific form of self-deception, namely that people simply find it easier to live with their own climate failings if they do not believe that things will actually get all that bad. "We call this thought process 'motivated reasoning,'...
The only thing the study showed was the dire state of psychological science. For starters, researchers were oblivious to their own prejudice and incompetent background research. They can't define a climate change denier in any scientific sense, it's not a label of a group of homo-sapiens who think the climate never changes, it's just a petty kindergarten insult designed to fool, well,... psychologists. And it works. If they had spent five minutes reading skeptical web-sites they'd know that half the population have good reason to be skeptical of unaudited and unaccountable foreign committees which rely on broken models. In fact if they were looking for "motivated reasoning" in the climate debate (and they say they were) then most of it is on the believer side, where people might be motivated by billions of dollars in government grants.

Zimmermann and his colleague Lasse Stötzer told people they could decide where a $20 donation went — they could choose which climate charity would get the cash, or they could keep it themselves. The "control" group weren't allowed to keep the cash themselves. Basically 41% to 44% of the crowd kept the money. But amazingly more than 50% still gave the cash to a climate charity. Humans are nice people, really. I mean, they could all have kept the cash, and most didn't. Presumably no one wants to look too scroogy in front of researchers, but some people know climate charities are pagan institutions designed to cheat money from the poor and give it to billionaires — so it's better to look like a scrooge than feed the machine.
At the center of the experiments was a donation worth $20. Participants were allocated at random to one of two groups. The members of the first group were able to split the $20 between two organizations, both of which were committed to combating climate change. By contrast, those in the second group could decide to keep the $20 for themselves instead of giving it away and would then actually receive the money at the end. "Anyone keeping hold of the donation needs to justify it to themselves," says Zimmermann, ... "One way to do that is to deny the existence of climate change."

Blue Planet

Forests break mesmerizing fractal law found throughout nature

forest crown
© Stewart Watson/Getty
The beautiful thing about fractals, the self-repeating patterns found throughout nature, is their enchanting repetition which runs infinitely deep.

Zoom in on the branching found in objects like fern fronds and snowflakes and you'll see they repeat in miniature - sometimes all the way down to atomic and quantum matter.

Mesmerizing as they are, such geometric patterns can have their limits. According to a new study that has found forest canopies don't replicate the fractal patterns of individual trees.

Comment: One term not mentioned in the article, that may be of interest, is 'crown shyness':
Crown shyness (also canopy disengagement,[1] canopy shyness,[2] or inter-crown spacing[3]) is a feature observed in some tree species, in which the crowns of fully stocked trees do not touch each other, instead forming a canopy with channel-like gaps.[4][5] This is most prevalent among trees of the same species, but also occurs between trees of different species.[6][7] There exist many hypotheses as to why crown shyness is an adaptive behavior, and research suggests that it might inhibit spread of leaf-eating insect larvae.[8]
crown shyness
Canopy of D. aromatica at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia displaying crown shyness



Galaxy

Hubble captures an image of spiral galaxy ESO 420-G013

seyfert galaxy ESO 420-G013
© NASA/ESA/A. Evans (University of Virginia)/Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
The galaxy is classified as a Seyfert galaxy, and is harboring a powerful black hole that is responsible for forming new stars at a high rate.

NASA announced that their Hubble Space Telescope, which has been orbiting Earth for more than two decades, observed the spiral galaxy named ESO 420-G013 last week as part of a study of Luminous Infrared Galaxies (LIRGs). According to the administration, LIRGs are known to be extremely bright in the infrared part of the spectrum.

The galaxy ESO 420-G013 is exactly that: an extremely bright spiral galaxy, and it is harboring a powerful black hole. It is located 50 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor which can be found in the southern sky.

ESOS 402-G013 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy. These types of galaxies were named after American astronomer Carl Keenan Seyfert, who studied the objects in 1943. Seyfert galaxies, for which there are two types, have an extremely bright, point-like active galactic nucleus powered by a supermassive black hole, according to NASA.

Rocket

Nuclear secret: India's space program uses plutonium pellets to power missions

photpgraph
© Pradeep Gaur/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty ImagesA Man photographs a scale model of the Chandrayaan 3 Vikram Lander at the Indian Space Research Organisation
New Delhi is experimenting with radioisotopes to charge its robotic missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond...

Indians are ecstatic over their space program's string of successes in recent months. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has a couple of well-kept tech secrets - one of them nuclear - that will drive future voyages to the cosmos.

In the Hollywood sci-fi movie 'The Martian', astronaut Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, is presumed dead and finds ways to stay alive on the red planet, mainly thanks to a big box of Plutonium known as a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG).

In the film, Watney uses it to travel in his rover to the 'Pathfinder', a robotic spacecraft which launched decades ago, to use its antenna to communicate with his NASA colleagues and tell them he's still alive. Additionally, the astronaut dips this box into a container of water to thaw it.

In real life, the RTG generates electricity from the heat of a decaying radioactive substance, in this case, Plutonium-238. This unique material emits steady heat due to its natural radioactive decay. Its continuous radiation of heat, often lasting decades, made it the material of choice for producing electrical power onboard several deep-space missions of the erstwhile USSR and the US.

Blue Planet

Major 'magnetic anomaly' discovered deep below New Zealand's Lake Rotorua, situated on dormant volcano

Lake Rotorua.
© nstitute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited (GNS ScienceMap of Lake Rotorua.
Lake Rotorua, which sits at the heart of a dormant volcano and is the setting for one of New Zealand's most famous Māori love stories, has been mapped in detail for the 1st time. Comments (0)

New maps have revealed a hidden hydrothermal system beneath a legendary lake in New Zealand, which serves as the setting for a famous Māori love story.

Lake Rotorua sits at the heart of a massive ancient crater of a dormant volcano on New Zealand's North Island. The lake has a storied history: it is where the daughter of an influential chief is said to have overcome forbidden love by swimming across the lake to be with a young warrior.