|
2019 In Science
A number of significant scientific events occurred in 2019. Events January * 1 January The ''New Horizons'' space probe flies by Kuiper belt object 486958 Arrokoth (nicknamed ''Ultima Thule''), the outermost close encounter of any Solar System object. * 2 January A study finds that tons of methane, a greenhouse gas, are released into the atmosphere by melting ice sheets in Greenland. * 3 January ** China's National Space Administration ( CNSA) achieves the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon with its Chang'e 4 mission. ** Scientists report the engineering of crops with a photorespiratory "shortcut" to boost plant growth by 40% in real-world agronomic conditions. * 4 January ** Researchers at Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) report a way to control properties of excitons and change the polarisation of light they generate, which could lead to transistors that undergo less energy loss and heat dissipation. ** Researchers design an inhalable form o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Messenger RNA
In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein. mRNA is created during the process of transcription, where an enzyme (RNA polymerase) converts the gene into primary transcript mRNA (also known as pre-mRNA). This pre-mRNA usually still contains introns, regions that will not go on to code for the final amino acid sequence. These are removed in the process of RNA splicing, leaving only exons, regions that will encode the protein. This exon sequence constitutes mature mRNA. Mature mRNA is then read by the ribosome, and the ribosome creates the protein utilizing amino acids carried by transfer RNA (tRNA). This process is known as translation. All of these processes form part of the central dogma of molecular biology, which describes the flow of genetic information in a biological system. As in DNA, genetic inf ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White Dwarf Stars
A white dwarf is a stellar core remnant composed mostly of electron-degenerate matter. A white dwarf is very dense: in an Earth sized volume, it packs a mass that is comparable to the Sun. No nuclear fusion takes place in a white dwarf; what light it radiates is from its residual heat. The nearest known white dwarf is Sirius B, at 8.6 light years, the smaller component of the Sirius binary star. There are currently thought to be eight white dwarfs among the hundred star systems nearest the Sun. The unusual faintness of white dwarfs was first recognized in 1910. The name ''white dwarf'' was coined by Willem Jacob Luyten in 1922. White dwarfs are thought to be the final evolutionary state of stars whose mass is not high enough to become a neutron star or black hole. This includes over 97% of the stars in the Milky Way. After the hydrogen- fusing period of a main-sequence star of low or intermediate mass ends, such a star will expand to a red giant and fuse helium to carb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexar
Lexar International is a brand of flash memory products, formerly American-owned, now manufactured by the Chinese memory company, Longsys. The Lexar "JumpDrive" trademark was often used synonymously with the term USB flash drives when the technology was first adopted. History Early years (1996–2006) Lexar was founded as an American manufacturer of digital media products based in San Jose, California. Products manufactured by Lexar include SD cards, CompactFlash cards, USB flash drives, card readers and solid-state drives. Once a division of Cirrus Logic, Lexar leveraged its parent company's experience in building ATA controllers in developing its own flash controllers. Lexar was spun off from Cirrus Logic in 1996. Lexar was created by Petro Estakhri and Mike Assar. In 2002, Lexar filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, alleging that Toshiba had copied its NAND flash memory technology. In 2005, a California jury initially awarded Lexar a total of $465 million in damages, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terabyte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as the Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory words of 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 48, or 60 bits, corresponding ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SD Card
Secure Digital (SD) is a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA). Owing to their compact size, SD cards have been widely adopted in a variety of portable consumer electronics, including digital cameras, camcorders, video game consoles, mobile phones, action cameras, and camera drones. The SD format was introduced in August 1999 by SanDisk, Panasonic (then known as Matsushita), and Kioxia (then part of Toshiba). It was designed as a successor to the MultiMediaCard (MMC) format, introducing several improvements aimed at enhancing usability, durability, and performance, which contributed to its rapid emergence as an industry standard. To manage the licensing and intellectual property rights related to the format, the three companies established SD-3C, LLC. In January 2000, they also founded the SDA, a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and promoting SD card standards. As of 2023, the SDA includes approxima ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nature (journal)
''Nature'' is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, ''Nature'' features Peer review, peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. ''Nature'' was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2022 ''Journal Citation Reports'' (with an ascribed impact factor of 50.5), making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. , it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month. Founded in the autumn of 1869, ''Nature'' was first circulated by Norman Lockyer and Alexander MacMillan (publisher), Alexander MacMillan as a public forum for scientific innovations. The mid-20th century facilitated an editorial expansion for the j ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fast Radio Burst
In radio astronomy, a fast radio burst (FRB) is a transient radio wave of length ranging from a fraction of a millisecond, for an ultra-fast radio burst, to 3 seconds, caused by a high-energy astrophysical process as yet not understood. Astronomers estimate the average FRB releases as much energy in a millisecond as the Sun puts out in three days. While extremely energetic at their source, the strength of the signal reaching Earth has been described as 1,000 times less than from a mobile phone on the Moon. The first FRB was discovered by Duncan Lorimer and his student David Narkevic in 2007 when they were looking through archival pulsar survey data, and it is therefore commonly referred to as the Lorimer burst. Many FRBs have since been recorded, including several that have been detected repeating in seemingly irregular ways. Only one FRB has been detected to repeat in a regular way: FRB 180916 seems to pulse every 16.35 days. Most FRBs are extragalactic, but the first Milky Wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantum Computing
A quantum computer is a computer that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena. On small scales, physical matter exhibits properties of wave-particle duality, both particles and waves, and quantum computing takes advantage of this behavior using specialized hardware. Classical physics cannot explain the operation of these quantum devices, and a scalable quantum computer could perform some calculations Exponential growth, exponentially faster than any modern "classical" computer. Theoretically a large-scale quantum computer could post-quantum cryptography, break some widely used encryption schemes and aid physicists in performing quantum simulator, physical simulations; however, the current state of the art is largely experimental and impractical, with several obstacles to useful applications. The basic unit of information in quantum computing, the qubit (or "quantum bit"), serves the same function as the bit in classical computing. However, unlike a classical bit, which can be in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM Q System One
IBM Quantum System One is the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer, introduced by IBM in January 2019. This integrated quantum computing system is housed in an airtight borosilicate glass cube that maintains a controlled physical environment. Each face of the cube is wide and tall. A cylindrical protrusion from the center of the ceiling is a dilution refrigerator, containing a 20-qubit transmon quantum processor. It was tested for the first time in the summer of 2018, for two weeks, in Milan, Italy. IBM Quantum System One was developed by IBM Research, with assistance from the Map Project Office and Universal Design Studio. CERN, ExxonMobil, Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are among the clients signed up to access the system remotely. From April 6 to May 31, 2019, the Boston Museum of Science hosted an exhibit featuring a replica of the IBM Quantum System One. On June 15, 2021, IBM deployed the first unit of Quantum S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source. It is known for the development of the stellarator and tokamak designs, along with numerous fundamental advances in plasma physics and the exploration of many other plasma confinement concepts. PPPL grew out of the top-secret Cold War project to control thermonuclear reactions, called Project Matterhorn. The focus of this program changed from H-bombs to fusion power in 1951, when Lyman Spitzer developed the stellarator concept and was granted funding from the Atomic Energy Commission to study the concept. This led to a series of machines in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1961, after declassification, Project Matterhorn was renamed the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. PPPL's stellarators proved unable to meet their performance goals. In 1968, Soviet ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
