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Nytimes

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Book Review: ‘The Miraculous From the Material,’ by Alan Lightman

In his book 'The Miraculous From the Material,' Alan Lightman explores natural phenomena and provides scientific explanations for them.
The book consists of 36 bite-size essaylets accompanied by photos, covering topics such as fireflies, flowers, hummingbirds, lightning, snowflakes, and more.
Lightman's approach is to find beauty in nature and then explain its underlying mathematics, physics, and chemistry in a conversational manner.
Contrary to the title, the author's focus is on the material aspects of the world rather than the miraculous, emphasizing the progress of science in understanding the natural world.

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Physicsworld

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Millions of smartphones monitor Earth’s ever-changing ionosphere

Researchers have tested a plan to use millions of smartphones to map real-time variations in Earth’s ionosphere.
The system could improve the accuracy of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) such as GPS and provide new insights into the ionosphere.
Smartphones with dual-frequency sensors can measure the ionosphere, creating a detailed view that wouldn't be possible otherwise.
The aggregated measurements from millions of smartphones can be used to improve location accuracy and understand the ionosphere better.

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Medium

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Capital One’s sessions and speakers at AWS re:Invent 2024

Capital One is sponsoring the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this year, giving attendees the chance to learn how the company leverages AWS to innovate at scale. Visitors to Capital One's booth will have the opportunity to see its data publishing and data lake platforms, and its agent servicing, which uses generative AI to streamline customer service.
The company's tech leaders will be speaking throughout the event, covering topics related to cloud-powered tech, AI-driven value and a responsible, unified approach to AI and generative AI. Other speeches will include talks on producing high-quality data for AI, building programs for generative AI at scale, and optimizing GPU and CPU utilization for cost savings and performance.
Attendees can also learn about AWS services for companies, such as building the future of cloud operations at any scale, reducing FM deployment costs and latency with Amazon SageMaker and unified pixel-perfect reporting and dashboards.
Capital One's speakers will provide practical insights for business value and user benefits such as AI-driven innovations in fraud detection, personalized banking, and customer service, which are shaping a new era of customer experience at Capital One.
Moreover, AWS and Capital One will discuss recent AWS compute innovations and how to meet cost, performance, and sustainability goals. They will talk about how enterprises can strengthen IT operations to be more agile, resilient, efficient, and secure while getting deeper insight for better decision-making.
Lastly, Capital One's robotics and AI team is constantly improving customer satisfaction and visual object detection. The firm also has a serverless team responsible for communication and monitoring. Visitors can find out more about AI and serverless work at the booth.

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Physicsworld

212

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Electromagnetic waves solve partial differential equations

Researchers at Newcastle University have developed a novel approach using waveguide-based structures to solve partial differential equations (PDEs).
PDEs are difficult to solve analytically and require significant computing power for numerical solutions.
The waveguide-based structures mimic elements in standard electronic circuits and can perform calculations at light speeds.
The method shows promise for solving boundary value problems and can be extended to higher frequency ranges in future research.

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Physicsworld

438

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Institute of Physics says physics ‘deep tech’ missing out on £4.5bn of extra investment

Physics-based businesses in the UK are missing out on almost £1bn of investment each year, according to a report by the Institute of Physics (IOP).
Venture capital investors face challenges in investing in high-innovation physics industries due to the lack of a standardized commercialization pathway.
Physics deep tech start-ups, based on high-tech innovation or significant scientific advances, attract only 30% of UK science venture capital investment.
The IOP calls for a coordinated effort from government, investors, and the science and business communities to develop investment pathways and unlock the full investment potential of physics deep tech.

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Physicsworld

110

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Cloudy with a chance of warming: how physicists are studying the dynamical impact of clouds on climate change

The physicists developing climate models face the challenge of understanding how clouds are changing as the Earth warms, and how these changes will affect the climate system. Clouds play an important role in the climate system, having a profound impact on Earth’s radiation budget. Research shows that even a subtle change in global cloud properties could noticeably affect the global energy budget, which could affect the amount of warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified feedback from cloud properties as the largest uncertainty in predicting future climate change. Rising cloud tops and a reduction in low cloud amount are believed to be partly responsible for some of the extreme weather in recent years. According to research, rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are driving a change in the asymmetry of cloud-cover changes between day and night, which, coupled with reduced pollution, is exacerbating global warming.
The way mixed-phase clouds (those that contain water vapour, ice particles and supercooled liquid droplets) in the atmosphere are distributed affects models' predictions of warming in response to greenhouse gas emissions. These clouds have the potential to shift from ice to liquid water which could enhance their cooling effect on Earth’s surface, providing a negative feedback that reduces some of the warming. However, many climate models overestimate the effect of this negative feedback. As well as generating greenhouse gases, fossil fuel burning produces aerosols, which can have a cooling effect on the planet by brightening clouds. Scientists are assessing whether aerosols could be deliberately used to manipulate cloud properties to mitigate climate change.
Proponents of marine cloud brightening propose using aerosol particles to increase reflectiveness of low-level liquid marine clouds mainly covering large areas of subtropical oceans, such as through saltwater spray. These particles could increase the number of cloud droplets and therefore increase cloud brightness, thereby generating a cooling effect. However, there are ethical concerns with cloud brightening, as cooling could benefit some regions while negatively impacting others, so the governance of such measures also needs to be addressed. Aerosol injection impact on cloud properties needs further research by bridging knowledge gaps with field experiments, working towards more accurately simulating the impact and to better predict the impact to the wider climate.

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Nytimes

377

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Squirting Cucumbers Shoot Their Seeds Like Botanical Bombardiers

The squirting cucumber Ecballium elaterium shoots its seeds violently in a stream of mucilage when they're ripe.
The seeds can be shot up to almost 40 feet.
Researchers have studied how the squirting cucumber goes ballistic and found that the fruit detaches from the stalk, opening a hole in the base and seeds emerge at speeds of up to 66 feet per second.
The whole process of seed ejection takes about 30 milliseconds.

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Github

372

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Breaking down CPU speed: How utilization impacts performance

The Performance Engineering team at GitHub conducted experiments to observe the impact of CPU utilization on system performance.
The team used a tool called “stress” to gradually increase CPU utilization and established a baseline by sending moderate production traffic to the Large Unicorn Collider (LUC) Kubernetes pod, which mirrored the same architecture and configuration as flagship workloads.
As expected, CPU time increased for all instance types as CPU utilization rose. Each instance type showed unique behavior and varying thresholds where performance began to decline.
The team observed that lower CPU utilization leads to better performance, while higher utilization leads to a decline in performance.
Intel’s Turbo Boost Technology also impacted CPU frequency, leading to a decrease as utilization increased, causing overall system performance to decline.
All nodes also had Hyper-Threading enabled, which allowed a single physical CPU core to operate as two virtual cores.
To achieve the optimal balance of CPU utilization, the team identified a threshold where CPU utilization is high enough to avoid underutilization but not so high as to significantly impair performance.
The team derived a mathematical model to identify the threshold by determining what percentage of CPU time degradation is acceptable and plotting the CPU utilization vs. CPU time (latency).
The team also discovered an issue where certain instances were not achieving their advertised maximum Turbo Boost CPU frequency due to a disabled CPU C-state, which prevented the CPU cores from halting even when they were not in use, and they successfully resolved it through re-enabling C-state.
These insights enable GitHub to inform resource provisioning strategies and maximize hardware investments.

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Fyfluiddynamics

213

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Running Out of Sand?

Headlines suggest that the world is running out of angular sand grains for concrete.
Angular sand grains make stronger concrete, but rounded ones need less water for workability.
Sand is manufacturable through machines and processes.
The issue is more about economics of mining and manufacturing sand.

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Physicsworld

408

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Cascaded crystals move towards ultralow-dose X-ray imaging

Researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) have developed a perovskite material that exhibits considerable stability, minimal ion migration and a high X-ray absorption cross-section – making it ideal for X-ray detection.
A team created devices using lab-grown single crystals of MAPbBr3. They first selected four identical crystals to evaluate (SC1, SC2, SC3 and SC4), each 3 x 3 mm in area and approximately 2 mm thick. Measuring various optical and electrical properties revealed high consistency across the four samples.
The researchers also measured the dark current for the four devices as the bias voltage changed from 0 to -10 V. They found that SC1 reached the highest dark current of 547 nA, while SC1–2, SC1–3 and SC1–4 showed progressively decreasing dark currents of 134, 90 and 50 nA, respectively
The two-crystal SC1–2 represents the optimal balance of performance and stability.
One key component required for low-dose X-ray imaging is a low detection threshold. The conventional single-crystal SC1 showed a detection limit of 590 nGy/s under a 2 V bias. SC1–2 decreased this limit to 100 nGy/s
Spatial resolution is another important consideration. To assess this, the researchers estimated the modulation transfer function (the level of original contrast maintained by the detector) for each of the four devices. They found that SC1–2 exhibited the best spatial resolution of 8.5 line pairs/mm.
In conclusion, the cascade-engineered configuration represents a significant shift in low-dose X-ray detection, with potential to advance applications that require minimal radiation exposure combined with excellent image quality.
The researchers are now investigating the application of the cascade structure in other perovskite single crystals, such as FAPbI3 and MAPbI3, with the goal of reducing their detection limits.

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Knowridge

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Scientists explore nature-inspired sunscreens for safer UV protection

Scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Warwick are studying urocanic acid as a potential ingredient for improved sunscreens.
Urocanic acid, a natural compound found in the skin, absorbs UV-A and UV-B rays.
Researchers aim to optimize urocanic acid's properties to create safer and more effective sunscreen filters.
Their research may lead to innovative, nature-inspired sunscreens that offer better UV protection and reduced environmental impact.

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Medium

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Machine Learning and the Physical World

Machine learning and physics can be combined to solve problems in the physical world.
Using physics as a foundation, synthetic data is generated to train machine learning models.
This approach aims at identifying patterns and correlations between physical laws and machine learning models.
This model can be applied to real-world physical problems from fundamental to more complex ones.
The article provides a journey into how machine learning and existing tools can enhance our understanding of the physical world and their correlations.
The article attempts to demonstrate the relationship between the motion of a falling object and machine learning.
This is done by training a model to predict the fall time of an object based on its height using synthetic data based on physics laws.
The model performance is evaluated by comparing its predictions to the actual fall times.
The paper raises fascinating questions about the nature of how models “learn” and represent physical laws.
This publication sets the stage for deeper investigations into machine learning and physics.

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Knowridge

377

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The early universe may have had giant batteries of dust

The largest magnetic fields in the universe may have found themselves charged up when the first stars began to shine.
The radiation from the first stars pushed on the dust grains, creating an electrical current and generating a weak but large-scale magnetic field.
These magnetic fields were initially very weak but grew in size through dynamo mechanisms, stretching for thousands of light-years.
Researchers suggest further investigation through simulations to understand the evolution of these magnetic fields in the early universe.

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Knowridge

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Axion dark matter may make spacetime ring

Dark matter made out of axions may have the power to make space-time ring like a bell, but only if it is able to steal energy from black holes.
Axions, a potential candidate for dark matter, have yet to be detected in the laboratory or in any experiments.
If axions or similar particles are the dark matter, they would be extremely lightweight and behave more like waves than particles.
Through a process called super-radiance, axion dark matter could steal angular momentum from black holes, resulting in the emission of gravitational waves.

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Medium

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Apry’s Cnstnt unified w harmonics mod 10

The news discusses the Taylor series expansion, geometric context, and infinite groups
The article mentions the third term in the Taylor series expansion of sine and its relationship to an infinite group of zeros
It also mentions the proof of the distribution of Gamma function and its connection to Apry's constant
The news further refers to the concepts of contour integration, polynomials, and integral calculations

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