Tag Archives: shapes

Discovering Unique Mobius Strip-Inspired Molecules: Unveiling Their Extraordinary Shapes

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Representation of electrons in a half Möbius molecule

Representation of Electrons in a Half Möbius Molecule

IBM Research and the University of Manchester

Recent discoveries by chemists reveal an intriguing new molecular structure, which exceeds the complexity of a traditional Möbius strip.

A Möbius strip is a twisted shape that requires an object, like an ant, to traverse it twice to return to its original side.

Igor Roncevic and his team at the University of Manchester have uncovered a more complex half-Möbius molecular structure. This breakthrough could revolutionize the manipulation of molecular shapes and topologies for various applications.

“This molecule is entirely novel and unexpected. Not only is it captivating that we have synthesized a molecule with unconventional topology, but we have also verified that such a structure is feasible, which was previously unconsidered,” he states.

To synthesize the molecule, the researchers combined 13 carbon atoms and two chlorine atoms into a ring on a gold substrate at ultra-low temperatures. Utilizing advanced atomic force and scanning tunneling microscopes, they precisely controlled individual atoms and analyzed the electron properties. Here, electrons do not remain rigidly attached but are diffused in a localized region, resembling tiny waves of matter.


The interactions among these electrons induced unprecedented twists within the molecule. A hypothetical quantum particle would need to revolve around the structure four times to return to its starting point.

Researchers demonstrated the ability to toggle the molecular state from left-handed to right-handed or to untwist it through small electromagnetic pulses. This innovation allows chemists to engineer molecular topology on demand.

To comprehend the newly discovered molecule and its potential existence, the researchers employed simulations on classical computers and an IBM quantum computer. Electron interactions are essential for introducing twists in molecules, which are challenging to simulate accurately on traditional platforms. However, quantum computers, built upon interacting quantum entities, can perform these simulations with greater precision, Roncevic notes.

According to team members, this research illustrates how quantum computing can tackle real-world chemistry challenges. Ivano Tavernelli from IBM emphasizes this point.

“This groundbreaking experiment integrates multiple facets of organic chemistry, surface science, nanoscience, and quantum chemistry,” asserts Gemma Solomon from the University of Copenhagen.

“This is an exciting endeavor that effectively translates abstract topological ideas into the field of molecular chemistry,” adds Kenichiro Itami from RIKEN, Japan, noting the technical significance of the research.

Kim Dong Ho, a professor at Yonsei University in South Korea, highlights the potential applications of shape-switchable molecules in sensor technology, indicating that they could toggle states in response to magnetic fields.

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Source: www.newscientist.com

Exploring How the Theory of Masculinity Shapes the World

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Feedback is the latest science and technology news of new scientists, the sidelines of the latest science and technology news. You can email Feedback@newscientist.com to send items you believe readers can be fascinated by feedback.

More male than male

In general, we suspect, along with most readers, that feedback has been cast to explain how the world has become in its current position. So we were intrigued by journalist Michael Hobbs. Post to the social media site Blueskyhighlights the 2013 paper American Journal of Sociology Called “Excessive Gender: A Test of Masculine Overcompensation Papers.”

The hypothesis is that when male masculinity is threatened, it is overcompensated as an “extreme demonstration of masculinity.” For example, when men were told they were feminine, they responded by expressing more support for the “dominant hierarchy” and said they wanted more personal strength. They also became more supportive of war and homophobia.

But the bit that caught Hobbes' attention is that they were interested in purchasing a sports utility vehicle (SUV) because it was so ridiculous.

Reading all this, I found that feedback stares into the universe, but the faces of famous people flashed in the past. It reminded me of singer James Blunt when he was interviewed on Jesse Ware's podcast. Table etiquette. He admitted that he had followed in college. A meat-only meal to prove his manliness and annoy his vegan friends– You'll just be diagnosed with scurvy.

We recall many examples of right-wing male men who confessed on social media that they did not believe in the existence of female orgasms.

It reminded me that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg's trash cans were talking to each other during the proposed cage battle for a year. And we thought those sociologists might have the point.

Ready and not ready

We are all trying to adapt to the rise of artificial intelligence, but the next technological revolution is Quantum Computers. Thanks to issue 3530, regular readers will already know this. But what about all the poor souls who didn't pick it up?

Luckily, Microsoft, the Computing Giant and Netscape Killer, has a solution. Quantum Ready Program to help business leaders prepare their businesses in the coming era.

What is being offered? Why teach leaders help to create “clear and comprehensive quantum response strategies for durable, competitive differentiation.” Quantum computing is promised to “simply solve meaningful problems and unlock business value in various fields.” Hype, stable at Microsoft.

As a result of this upcoming power of quantum computing, leaders need to “understand the organizational change needed to lead the quantum era through a structured approach to business transformation tailored to the organization's objectives.” They need to “run Quantum Application Roadmap” for businesses that “assess the impact of Quantum.” In other words, do some research, plan, and do it. You really can't put financial value on advice that combines quality and originality to that extent.

The problem, of course, is that we don't know if quantum computers will be useful or if they will be of any exact help. So, while companies may spend a lot of time preparing for a quantum future, we see that surprisingly different quantum futures actually occur.

In a very realistic sense, even if the company is quantum-enabled, it is not quantum-enabled. If there is a thought experiment that could explain such a situation.

How to leave the planet

Given the state of things mentioned above, feedback sometimes makes me wonder if we might depart Planet Earth for a new meadow. Certainly space travel plagues dangers like metstone strikes, intense radiation, and true heart-wrenching scales of interstellar distance.

However, on the other hand, the grass may have greenery. In the idol moment, we may be able to fantasize that the approaching asteroid 2024 YR4 is a disguised flying saucer and cover the lift into the Alpha Centauri.

So when we learn, we can imagine our surprise through sustainability consultant Niki Rus Unusual LinkedIn Recruitment Certainly.com. A company called Black Book Resourcing Ltd wanted it “Pioner Colonists – Mars Village Program.” Responsibilities include “establishing and maintaining a life support system,” “generating power and managing resources for long-term survival” (just a little of the understatement here), “working as a team under extreme conditions.”

A rather long list of “essential requirements” includes “peak physical and mental endurance” and “backgrounds for engineering, medicine, botany, geology, or survival skills.” Confusingly, this list requires both “completely isolated adaptability and resilience” and “strong teamwork and leadership skills.” Finally, you should have “Don't depend on the luxury of the earth, only grit and resolve.” “Previous Experiences in Extreme Environments” is optional.

Not everything is in a hurry: the listing has expired and we are not at all sure it is authentic. Moreover, given the frankly intense requirements, the feedback was surprised to see that the proposed salary was between £60,000 and £100,000 a year. However, the company deserves credit for listing the work as “permanent.” That will definitely be the case. Bonus points for the location. This is described simply as “remote”.

Have you talked about feedback?

You can send stories to feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week and past feedback can be found on our website.

Source: www.newscientist.com

Elon Musk Shapes TechScape: X into its Ultimate Form

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Hello. Welcome to TechScape. I’m Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at Guardian US. In today’s newsletter, we discuss the final form of X, learnings from a jam-packed week of earnings, and niche online Halloween costumes. Thank you for your participation.

The US election culminates the transformation of X into Elon Musk’s weapon. He has managed to bend social networks to his will.

Last week, Musk tweeted and linked to a forum within X called the Election Integrity Community, encouraging his followers to report “potential voting fraud or fraud.” Experts told my colleague Johana Bhuiyan that the community, which has more than 50,000 members, has a swamp of conspiratorial overtones and uncorrected misinformation that will make it a face in 2020. It is said that it is similar to the book “Stop the Steal” group.

Users posting to the self-contained feed quickly began pointing out what appeared to be evidence of fraud and election interference.

Tweets showing everything from torn ballots to ABC News to system tests to postal workers doing their jobs and dropping mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the presidential election was compromised. Some of the tweets include attempts to record personal information and identify people who users have falsely accused of stuffing ballots and interfering with voting by Trump supporters. Before anyone can decide whether the allegation is true or false, users occupy the post and assume the unsuspecting person they see is guilty.

Mr. Musk has weaponized the ability of X. He is trying to bend the posts of others to his own political will and frame the discussion into an alternate reality. He gives preferential treatment to some posts and hides others. The Washington Post reported last week that of the top 100 tweeting accounts in Congress, only Republicans are spreading the word. When he first acquired Twitter, Musk deployed Twitter’s internal documents to rebuild its public image. twitter file. He then criticized his own account for supporting Donald Trump. He bombarded his followers with pro-Trump messages and flawed Trump interviews on the Twitter space.

We have never seen a transformation like X. Billionaires are not afraid of campaigning or naked partisanship, bending the connected networks of tens of millions of people to their own vision of reality. The October surprise was Elon Musk.

With no economic success with forced purchases, Musk turned to politics to make his $44 billion bet pay off. My colleague Dan Milmo says: “Company X’s continued influence as a news source and its role as a vehicle for broadcasting its owner’s right-wing views to over 200 million followers requires measuring the benefit to the world’s richest people. That means no ‘financial benchmarks alone.” Think of the restoration of Trump’s account and all of Musk’s pro-Trump tweets as an in-kind donation that Musk will cash in on during Trump’s presidency.

Will it ever end once the election is over? – The value of X decreases. It will become less important for the world’s richest man to make noise about voter fraud conspiracies. As with any media that has seen an increase in interest in political battles and the associated craters, X’s traffic will likely decline. We will see the effects of Mr. Musk’s weaponization in the light.

Lessons learned from profits

The floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Spencer Pratt/Getty Images

Five of the Magnificent Seven (Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Apple) announced their quarterly results last week. Not all stocks rose, but all beat Wall Street’s earnings expectations. Several lessons can be learned from their impressive performance.

1. Advertising remains the lifeblood of the internet economy
Google’s revenue, Meta’s revenue, and even Amazon’s revenue show that digital advertising can still maintain an empire.

2. Investments in AI, especially in cloud businesses, are paying off.
Bully Google, Microsoft, and Amazon! Like Meta, these companies have increased their capital spending by tens of billions of dollars to pay for their artificial intelligence products, but investors think it’s worth it. It seems so. Each company reported strong growth in its cloud business. Meta’s investments in open source AI likewise led to Meta AI being deployed at Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and claiming the title of most used AI. Investors loved it.

3. Both of these outcomes benefit one company in particular
Last week, Reddit became the first publicly traded company to report a profit, posting a massive 68% increase in revenue compared to the same period last year. The company makes most of its revenue from advertising, so a strong market means Reddit makes more money, even if it’s a smaller player than Google or Meta. Reddit’s ad revenue increased by 56%.

Reddit chief Steve Huffman also attributed the company’s better-than-expected results to a new revenue stream: deals with AI companies. Anyone who wants to build a large-scale language model that generates English text uses Reddit to train their AI. That social network is a huge, well-organized collection of human-written texts. Reddit licenses its datasets to Google, OpenAI, and others for tens of millions of dollars. That funding source may not last forever, but it’s not going away anytime soon.

Reddit is also benefiting from AI. The social network’s monthly user count increased by half to 97 million in the past quarter alone. Huffman attributes the dramatic increase to the social network’s new translation feature, which uses AI to transliterate English posts into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. The company plans to expand this feature in the coming months.

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new york magazine John Herman points out on Reddit:As a repository of human-written material, it is also useful for people who want to be sure that what they are reading was not written by an AI. As a result, Reddit has become “Google’s favorite website” and a throne with the Sword of Damocles, Herman writes. Huffman said Reddit became the sixth most searched word on Google. Many digital media reach similar heights only to be brought down by a crash.

This week on iPhone

Halloween costumers made headlines on Twitter and Instagram this week. Photo: Sonia Bonnet/Alamy

Niche Halloween costumes have received meme treatment with a proliferation of jokes starting with “I hate gay Halloween…” on Instagram with X. This meme seems to point to something bigger. Online culture has gotten to the point where we’re not just debating the appeal of individual specific references. NeNe Leaks and the white refrigeratorFor example, we discuss the value of taking internet inside jokes seriously. Is it worth wearing a bulky cardboard box all night screaming, “This is from an early season of ‘The Real Housewives’!” It’s a little self-loathing to start a tweet about your costume with “I hate it.” We expect to see more witches and cats next year.

Although perhaps not. a Rebuttal from X In the Name of Joy: “I love everyone’s niche Halloween costumes!! “I love the specificity of it. I love the creativity. Putting so much time and effort into something literally just to make yourself laugh And I really love having things explained to me when I don’t understand.

As for me, I dressed up as a skeleton for the third year in a row.

Wider Techscape

Keeping up with tons of messages in group chats can be a pain. Photo: Weare/Getty Images

Source: www.theguardian.com

Unique Crown Shapes of Early Carboniferous Tree Species

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Sanphodiacaulis densifolia is an extinct tree species that existed in what is now New Brunswick, Canada, between 359 and 347 million years ago (Carboniferous period). The structure consisted of an unbranched 16 cm diameter trunk and compound leaves arranged in a 13 cm spiral and compressed to a vertical trunk length of 14 cm. The compound leaves in the upper 0.75 m of the trunk were over 1.75 m long, with preserved alternating secondary collaterals starting 0.5 m from the trunk. In the lower region of the trunk there were only persistent leaf bases. Sanphodiacaulis densifolia shows that the early Carboniferous vegetation was more complex than expected, indicating that this was an experimental, perhaps transitional, period of diverse growth structures.

Sanphodiacaulis densifolia. Image credit: Tim Stonecipher.

Trees first appeared during the Middle Devonian period (393 to 383 million years ago), but modern woody plants did not appear until about 10 million years later.

Evidence for dendritic structures (tree-like structures) is primarily based on mud moldings, sand moldings, or calcified stumps, or extensive root structures in fossilized soils.

Under unique preservation conditions, these early trees fossilized with roots and crown structures attached to their trunks.

“The method is Sanphodiacaulis densifolia “It has very long leaves around its slender trunk, and it's amazing how many leaves there are on such a short trunk,” said Dr. Robert Gastaldo, a paleontologist at Colby College. he said.

“The morphology of these 350-million-year-old trees looks like ferns or palms, even though palms arose 300 million years ago.”

“However, the functional leaves of ferns and palm trees are clustered at the top and are relatively few in number.”

“in contrast, Sanphodiacaulis densifolia More than 250 leaves have been preserved around the trunk, with each partially preserved leaf extending 1.75 meters from the trunk. ”

“We estimate that each leaf grew at least another meter before it finished.”

“This means that ‘bottlebrush’ had a dense canopy of leaves that were not woody and spread for at least 5.5 meters around a trunk that was only 16 cm in diameter. Amazing to say the least. .”

Sanphodiacaulis densifolia It has compound leaves arranged in a spiral.Image credit: Gastaldo other., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.011.

Dr. Gastaldo and his colleagues examined five fossil specimens. Sanphodiacaulis densifolia.

The fossil was excavated from the Sanford Quarry, part of the Albert Formation in New Brunswick, Canada.

“These fossils were preserved when an earthquake destroyed trees and other vegetation along the edge of a rift lake,” Gastaldo said.

“The first fossil wood was unearthed from a quarry about seven years ago, but it contained only one partial sample.”

“It took several years to find four other specimens of the same plant in close spatial proximity.”

“One of the specimens reveals how the leaves separate from the top of the tree, which makes this tree quite unique.”

“This is one of the few preserved trunks with crown leaves still attached in a fossil record spanning more than 400 million years.”

Actual and reconstructed heights and biostratigraphic ranges of Pennsylvanian trees from the Middle Devonian. Image credit: Gastaldo et al., doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.011.

Sanphodiacaulis densifolia It probably relied on its unusual growth form to maximize the amount of light it could capture and reduce competition with other plants above ground.

This discovery provides important insights into the evolution of plants and arboreal growth, that is, plants that grow to the height of a tree, or at least 4.5 m, at maturity.

They also remind us that throughout the history of life on Earth, there have been trees that look like nothing we've ever seen before.

“We all have a mental concept of what a tree looks like, depending on where we live on the planet, and we all have a vision of something familiar,” Dr. Gastaldo said. Ta.

“The fossils we report are unique and represent some of the strangest growth forms in the history of life.”

“This is an evolutionary experiment during a period of forest plant biodiversity, and it appears to be a short-lived form.”

“The history of life on land consists of plants and animals that are different from those that live today,” he added.

“The evolutionary mechanisms that operated in the distant past allowed organisms to survive for long periods of time, but their shape, morphology, growth structure, and life history followed different trajectories and strategies.”

“Rare and unusual fossils like the New Brunswick tree are just a few examples of failed experiments that have colonized our planet.”

a paper The survey results were published in a magazine current biology.

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Robert A. Gastaldo other. A mysterious fossil plant with a three-dimensional tree-like growth structure from the earliest Carboniferous period in New Brunswick, Canada. current biology, published online on February 2, 2024. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.011

Source: www.sci.news