Aurelia Butler

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  • 113 Shares199 Views

    in Computers Math

    Groundbreaking mathematical proof: New insights into typhoon dynamics unveiled

    In a remarkable breakthrough in the field of Mathematical Science, Professor Kyudong Choi from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at UNIST has provided an irrefutable proof that certain spherical vortices exist in a stable state. This groundbreaking discovery holds significant implications for predicting weather anomalies and advancing weather prediction technologies.
    A vortex is a rotating region of fluid, such as air or water, characterized by intense rotation. Common examples include typhoons and tornadoes frequently observed in news reports. Professor Choi’s mathematical proof establishes the stability of specific types of vortex structures that can be encountered in real-world fluid flows.
    The study builds upon the foundational Euler equation formulated by Leonhard Euler in 1757 to describe the flow of eddy currents. In 1894, British mathematician M. Hill mathematically demonstrated that a ball-shaped vortex could maintain its shape indefinitely while moving along its axis.
    Professor Choi’s research confirms that Hill’s spherical vortex maximizes kinetic energy under certain conditions through the application of variational methods. By incorporating functional analysis and partial differential equation theory from mathematical analysis, this study extends previous investigations on two-dimensional fluid flows to encompass three-dimensional fluid dynamics with axial symmetry conditions.
    One notable feature identified by Hill is the presence of strong upward airflow at the front of the spherical vortex — an attribute often observed in phenomena like typhoons and tornadoes. Professor Choi’s findings serve as a starting point for further studies involving measurements related to residual time associated with these ascending air currents.
    “Research on vortex stability has gained international attention,” stated Professor Choi. “[A]nd it holds long-term potential for advancements in today’s weather forecasting technology.”
    Supported by funding from Korea Research Foundation under the Ministry of Science and ICT as well as UNIST, this study was published ahead of official release on July 24th via the online edition of Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. More

  • 88 Shares169 Views

    in Computers Math

    Can ChatGPT help us form personal narratives?

    Research has shown that personal narratives — the stories we tell ourselves about our lives — can play a critical role in identity and help us make sense of the past and present. Research has also shown that by helping people reinterpret narratives, therapists can guide patients toward healthier thoughts and behaviors.
    Now, researchers from the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania have tested the ability of ChatGPT-4 to generate individualized personal narratives based on stream-of-consciousness thoughts and demographic details from participants, and showed that people found the language model’s responses accurate.
    In a new study in The Journal of Positive Psychology, Abigail Blyler and Martin Seligman found that 25 of the 26 participants rated the AI-generated responses as completely or mostly accurate, 19 rated the narratives as very or somewhat surprising, and 19 indicated they learned something new about themselves. Seligman, the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology, is the director of the Positive Psychology Center, and Blyler is his research manager.
    “This is a rare moment in the history of scientific psychology: Artificial intelligence now promises much more effective psychotherapy and coaching,” Seligman says.
    For each participant, the researchers fed ChatGPT-4 recorded stream-of-consciousness thoughts, which Blyler likened to diary entries with thoughts as simple as “I’m hungry” or “I’m tired.” In a second study published concurrently in The Journal of Positive Psychology, they fed five narratives rated “completely accurate” into ChatGPT-4, asked for specific interventions, and found that the chatbot generated highly plausible coaching strategies and interventions.
    “Since coaching and therapy typically involve a great deal of initial time spent fleshing out such an identity, deriving this automatically from 50 thoughts represents a major savings,” the authors write.
    Abigail Blyler and Martin Seligman, Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology and director of Penn’s Positive Psychology Center. More

  • 125 Shares179 Views

    in Computers Math

    Making elbow room: Giant molecular rotors operate in solid crystal

    Solid materials are generally known to be rigid and unmoving, but scientists are turning this idea on its head by exploring ways to incorporate moving parts into solids. This can enable the development of exotic new materials such as amphidynamic crystals — crystals which contain both rigid and mobile components — whose properties can be altered by controlling molecular rotation within the material.
    A major challenge to achieving motion in crystals — and in solids in general — is the tightly packed nature of their structure. This restricts dynamic motion to molecules of a limited size. However, a team led by Associate Professor Mingoo Jin from the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (WPI-ICReDD), Hokkaido University has set a size record for such dynamic motion, demonstrating the largest molecular rotor shown to be operational in the solid-state.
    A molecular rotor consists of a central rotating molecule that is connected by axis molecules to stationary stator molecules, similar to the way that a wheel and axle are connected to a car frame. Such systems have been previously reported, but the crystalline material in this study features an operational rotor consisting of the molecule pentiptycene, which is nearly 40% larger in diameter than previous rotors in the solid-state, marking a significant advancement.
    To enable rotation of such a large molecule, it was necessary to create enough free space within the solid. The team synthesized concave, umbrella-like metal complexes that could shield the rotor molecule from unwanted interactions with other molecules in the crystal. They were able to create sufficient space to accommodate the giant rotor by attaching an especially large, bulky molecule to the metal atom of the stator.
    “I got the idea from an egg, which makes a large space and protects its inside with a circular hardcover,” said Jin. “To bring this feature to a molecule, I envisioned encapsulating the rotator space by using bulky concave shaped stators.”
    A comparison of experimental and simulated nuclear magnetic resonance spectra of the crystal suggested that the giant molecular rotor rotates in 90-degree intervals at a frequency in the range of 100-400 kHz.
    This work expands what is possible for molecular motion in the solid-state. It provides a blueprint for exploring new avenues in the development of amphidynamic crystals, and could lead to the development of new functional materials with unique properties.
    “The pentiptycene rotators utilized in this work have several pocket sites,” commented Jin. “This structural feature allows the inclusion of many types of guest compounds including luminophores, which could enable development of highly functional, sophisticated optical or luminescent solid-state materials.” More

  • 138 Shares179 Views

    in Computers Math

    Intense lasers shine new light on the electron dynamics of liquids

    The behavior of electrons in liquids plays a big role in many chemical processes that are important for living things and the world in general. For example, slow electrons in liquid have the capacity to cause disruptions in the DNA strand.
    But electron movements are extremely hard to capture because they take place within attoseconds: the realm of quintillionths of a second. Since advanced lasers now operate at these timescales, they can offer scientists glimpses of these ultrafast processes via a range of techniques.
    An international team of researchers has now demonstrated that it is possible to probe electron dynamics in liquids using intense laser fields and to retrieve the electron’s mean free path — the average distance an electron can travel before colliding with another particle.
    “We found that the mechanism by which liquids emit a particular light spectrum, known as the high-harmonic spectrum, is markedly different from the ones in other phases of matter like gases and solids,” said Zhong Yin from Tohoku University’s International Center for Synchrotron Radiation Innovation Smart (SRIS) and co-first author of the paper. “Our findings open the door to a deeper understanding of ultrafast dynamics in liquids.”
    Details of the group’s research was published in the journal Nature Physics on September 28, 2023.
    Using intense laser fields to generate high-energy photons, a phenomenon known as high-harmonic generation (HHG), is a widespread technique used in many different areas of science, for instance for probing electronic motion in materials, or tracking chemical reactions in time. HHG has been studied extensively in gases and more recently in crystals, but much less is known about liquids.
    The research team, which also included researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) in Hamburg and ETH Zurich, reported on the unique behavior of liquids when irradiated by intense lasers. Until now, almost nothing is known about these light-induced processes in liquids, which surround us everywhere and are present in every chemical reaction. In contrast, scientists have made significant strides in recent years in exploring the behavior of solids under irradiation. Therefore, the experimental team at ETH Zurich developed a unique apparatus to specifically study the interaction of liquids with intense lasers. The researchers discovered a distinctive behavior where the maximum photon energy obtained through HHG in liquids was independent of the laser’s wavelength. What, then, was the responsible factor? More

  • 113 Shares139 Views

    in Computers Math

    Ball milling provides high pressure benefits to battery materials

    Cheaper, more efficient lithium-ion batteries could be produced by harnessing previously overlooked high pressures generated during the manufacturing process.
    Scientists at the University of Birmingham have discovered that routine ball milling can cause high pressure effects on battery materials in just a matter of minutes, providing a vital additional variable in the process of synthesizing battery materials.
    The research (part of the Faraday Institution funded CATMAT project), led by Dr Laura Driscoll, Dr Elizabeth Driscoll and Professor Peter Slater at the University of Birmingham is published in RSC Energy Environmental Science.
    The use of ball milling has been a huge area of growth in the lithium-ion battery space to make next generation materials. The process is simple and consists of milling powder compounds with small balls that mix and make the particles smaller, creating high-capacity electrode materials and leading to better performing batteries.
    Previous studies had led experts to believe that the synthesis of these materials was caused by localised heating generated in the milling process. But now researchers have found that dynamic impacts from the milling balls colliding with the battery materials create a pressure effect which plays an important role in causing the changes.
    Peter Slater, Professor of Materials Chemistry and Co-Director of the Birmingham Centre for Energy Storage at the University of Birmingham, said: “This discovery was almost an accident. We ball milled lithium molybdate as a model system to explore oxygen redox in batteries, and noticed that there was a phase transformation to the high-pressure spinel polymorph, a specific crystal structure that has only previously been made under high-pressure conditions.
    “Local heating alone could not explain this transformation. To test this theory, we then ball milled three other battery materials and our findings from these milling experiments reinforced our conclusion that local heating could not be the only reason for these changes.”
    The researchers also found that applying heat would cause some compounds to return to their pre-milled state, signifying that an additional variable was at play in the original synthesis: pressure being key. More

  • 75 Shares199 Views

    in Computers Math

    Accelerating sustainable semiconductors with ‘multielement ink’

    Semiconductors are the heart of almost every electronic device. Without semiconductors, our computers would not be able to process and retain data; and LED (light-emitting diode) lightbulbs would lose their ability to shine.
    But semiconductor manufacturing requires a lot of energy. Forming semiconductor materials from sand (silicon oxide) consumes a significant amount of heat-intensive energy, at scorching temperatures of around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. And the process of purifying and assembling all the raw materials that go into making a semiconductor can take weeks if not months.
    A new semiconducting material called “multielement ink” could make that process significantly less heat-intensive and more sustainable. Developed by researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley, “multielement ink” is the first “high-entropy” semiconductor that can be processed at low-temperature or room temperature. The breakthrough was recently reported in the journal Nature.
    “The traditional way of making semiconductor devices is energy-intensive and one of the major sources of carbon emissions,” said Peidong Yang, the senior author on the study. Yang is a faculty senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and professor of chemistry and materials science and engineering at UC Berkeley. “Our new method of making semiconductors could pave the way for a more sustainable semiconductor industry.”
    The advance takes advantage of two unique families of semiconducting materials: hard alloys made of high-entropy semiconductors; and a soft, flexible material made of crystalline halide perovskites.
    High-entropy materials are solids made of five or more different chemical elements that self-assemble in near-equal proportions into a single system. For many years, researchers have wanted to use high-entropy materials to develop semiconducting materials that self-assemble with minimal energy inputs.
    “But high-entropy semiconductors have not been studied to nearly the same extent. Our work could help to significantly fill in that gap of understanding,” said Yuxin Jiang, co-first author and graduate student researcher in the Peidong Yang group with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the department of chemistry at UC Berkeley. More

  • 88 Shares129 Views

    in Computers Math

    Wearable patch wirelessly monitors estrogen in sweat

    The sex hormone commonly known as estrogen plays an important role in multiple aspects of women’s health and fertility. High levels of estrogen in the body are associated with breast and ovarian cancers, while low levels of estradiol can result in osteoporosis, heart disease, and even depression. (Estrogen is a class of hormones that includes estradiol as the most potent form). Estradiol is also necessary for the development of secondary sexual characteristics in women and regulates the reproductive cycle.
    Because of its many functions, the hormone estradiol is often specifically monitored by physicians as part of women’s health care, but this usually requires the patient to visit a clinic to have blood drawn for analysis in a lab. Even at-home testing kits require samples of blood or urine to be mailed to a lab.
    But now Caltech researchers have developed a wearable sensor that monitors estradiol by detecting its presence in sweat. The researchers say the sensor may one day make it easier for women to monitor their estradiol levels at home and in real time.
    The research was conducted in the lab of Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering, investigator with the Heritage Medical Research Institute, and Ronald and JoAnne Willens Scholar. In recent years, Gao has developed sweat sensors that detect cortisol, a hormone associated with stress; the presence of the COVID-19 virus; a biomarker indicating inflammation in the body; and a whole slew of other nutrients and biological compounds.
    Gao says the development of the estradiol sensor was spurred in part by requests from people who were unsatisfied with the options they had for monitoring their estrogen levels and had seen his previous work.
    “People often ask me if I could make the same kind of sweat sensor for female hormones, because we know how much those hormones impact women’s health,” Gao says.
    One population of women who would benefit from estradiol monitoring are those who are attempting to conceive a child, either naturally or through in vitro fertilization. The success of either method is dependent on getting timing right with regards to ovulation, but not all women have a reproductive cycle that follows a regular schedule. Some women have been able to track their ovulation by monitoring their body temperature, but Gao says that method has limited usefulness because it’s not very accurate and body temperature doesn’t increase until ovulation has begun. More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Heart

    New computer analysis hints volcanism killed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid

    For decades, scientists have vigorously debated whether an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Roughly three-quarters of all life on Earth, including all nonbird dinosaurs, went extinct at that time, putting a dramatic end to the Cretaceous Period.

    Now, researchers have devised a new way to identify the true dino killer: Let computers take a crack at it.

    The result of that computational effort suggests that massive bursts of gas produced by the Deccan Traps eruptions were solely capable of causing the extinction event, the team reports in the Sept. 29 Science. Those eruptions, which lasted roughly a million years, spewed massive amounts of gas-ridden lava across what’s now western India.

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    “Rather than come at it from the perspective of ‘let’s blame the volcanoes and explain why’ or ‘let’s blame asteroids and explain why,’” the goal was to have as little human input or bias in the process as possible, says Dartmouth computational geologist Alexander Cox.

    The idea was to work backward using evidence from the scene of the crime. Scientists do have a smoking gun: Cores drilled into deep-ocean sediments contain geologic data pointing to deadly bursts of gas to the atmosphere, particularly planet-warming carbon dioxide and ocean-acidifying sulfur dioxide.

    But such gases could have come from the asteroid strike, as it incinerated rocks on the planet’s surface, Cox says, or from the Deccan Traps eruptions.

    Previous efforts to understand the source of the gases have focused on timing, examining pulses of lava emplacement during the Deccan Traps eruptions, Cox says (SN: 2/21/19). But “we only have best guesses about how much initial gas was in [the lava].” Estimated carbon dioxide concentrations in the lava, for example, vary by an order of magnitude, he says. “So that’s why we approached this from a gas-emissions perspective rather than a lava-flow perspective.”

    Vast hardened lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, cover much of what’s now western India. The lava is the remnant of a massive volcanic event about 66 million years ago. New computer analyses suggest that gases emitted during this event were enough to shift Earth’s temperature and may have led to the demise of nonbird dinosaurs.Baajhan at English Wikipedia

    To disentangle the relative contributions of each potential culprit, Cox and Dartmouth geologist C. Brenhin Keller used a statistical model called a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. That approach systematically considers the probability of different scenarios of gas emissions from the different sources, converging toward possible solutions as the results of the simulations move closer and closer to geologic observations.

    What made the researchers’ approach particularly powerful is that they harnessed 128 different processors to run scenarios in parallel, Cox says. “All the processors then compared how they’re doing at the end of every model run, like classmates comparing answers.” That parallel computing meant that computations that would otherwise have taken a year took only a few days.

    The observations Cox and Keller used were data collected from three cores drilled into deep-sea sediments, each spanning 67 million to 65 million years ago. In those sediments are foraminifera, ocean-dwelling microorganisms whose carbonate shells contain different isotopes, or forms, of carbon and oxygen. The shells’ chemical makeup records the ocean chemistry at the time of their formation, and so can be used as a proxy to infer past global temperatures as well as how many creatures were thriving in the oceans, and how much carbon was moving between the atmosphere, ocean and land (SN: 1/16/20).

    The computer simulations determined that the amount of gas spewed into the atmosphere from the volcanism alone was enough to account for the changes in temperature and carbon cycling determined from the foraminifera data in the drill cores.

    As for the asteroid strike, which formed the massive Chicxulub crater in what’s now Mexico, it probably did not produce a big spike in carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, the analysis found (SN: 1/25/17).

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    But many scientists are not convinced that these findings provide the ultimate answer to this long-standing, complex question. “It’s an elegant way to address this problem,” says Sierra Petersen, a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Modeling in this way “gives the freedom to find the consensus solution, taking multiple proxy records into account. However, like any model, output depends on input.”

    Petersen notes that foraminifera shells are not an ideal proxy for ancient temperatures: The oxygen isotope ratios in foraminifera shells can change not only due to temperature but also due to seawater composition. Different temperature proxies would likely lead to different patterns of gas release reproduced in models, Petersen says.

    As for the mass extinction culprit, she adds, “it’s a bit of a leap to say that this study shows the impact didn’t cause the extinction. I think what they show is that the impact was likely not associated with a large [gas] release.” But the asteroid, she says, still could have had other deadly impacts on the planet’s environment.  

    Indeed, “the Chicxulub impact led to many devastating effects beyond the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions explored in this study,” says Clay Tabor, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

    Those include massive clouds of soot and dust kicked up from pulverized rocks due to the impact, he says. Previous research has suggested this dust may have dimmed the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by as much as 20 percent, inducing a frigid winter that swiftly killed off plants and destroyed habitats (SN: 7/17/20).

    What’s more, the new study suggests that the asteroid impact didn’t have a long-term effect on the planet’s carbon cycle, based on carbon isotope data recorded in the foraminifera shells for the million years after the extinction. But there was an abrupt drop in the abundance of those creatures corresponding to the time of the impact, Tabor says. “The rapid rate of change caused by the Chicxulub impact was likely responsible for its effects on life.”

    “Many geochemical records spanning the [extinction event], as well as this modeling work, cannot capture well the rates of change associated with the Chicxulub impact,” he says. “The impact may have released significantly less CO2 and SO2 than the Deccan Traps, but it did so almost instantaneously.” So even if the asteroid impact released fewer gases overall, Tabor says, the speediness of that release could have been devastating all the same. More