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Engineering Breakthrough Paves Way for Chip Components That Could Serve As Both RAM and ROM

Year after year, the explosive growth of computing power relies on manufacturers’ ability to fit more and more components into the same amount of space on a silicon chip. That progress, however, is now approaching the limits of the laws of physics, and new materials are being explored as potential replacements for the silicon semiconductors long at the heart of the computer industry. New materials may also enable entirely new paradigms for individual chip components and their overall design. One long-promised advance is the ferroelectric field-effect transistor, or FE-FET. Such devices could switch states rapidly enough to perform computation, but…

How cancer cells eats each other to survive

Can you imagine being so desperate for food that you would eat yourself to survive? Most people can’t but our cells do exactly this. When cells are deprived of energy and nutrients from their external environment, they look internally, packaging up and consuming their own components to survive until an energy source becomes available. Once a food or nutrient source is available, cells are able to replace these components. This cellular process is called autophagy, from “auto-” the Greek word for self and “phagein” meaning to eat. And cancer cells take advantage of this survival mechanism to evade some anti-cancer…

This self-charging electric-vehicle maker is giving Tesla a run for its money — and an IPO could be just around the bend

Sono Motors, a German company whose electric vehicles charge themselves, is giving Tesla a run for its money in terms of cash preorders for its flagship vehicle and could go public soon. Founded in 2016, Munich-based Sono Motor’s flagship Sion vehicle is encased with solar cells that allow it to self-charge, adding 112 kilometers of solar-generated range to its 54kWh battery each week. Also equipped with a battery that can be charged off the electricity grid, the five-seat Sion is said to be able to travel 305 kilometers on a single charge — nearly 190 miles — with a planned…

Roscosmos Launches Progress MS-17 to the International Space Station

Roscosmos has launched their latest resupply mission to the International Space Station, Progress MS-17. The launch occurred at 23:27 UTC on June 29 from Site 31/6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. A Soyuz 2.1a launch vehicle was used to launch the Progress MS-17 spacecraft. The mission is known to NASA as Progress 78P, as Progress MS-17 is the 78th Russian resupply mission to the ISS. Pre-launch preparations In early March 2020, the Progress MS-17 spacecraft arrived at the Baikonur Cosmodrome after traveling from the RSC Energia manufacturer by rail. On March 11, 2020, the spacecraft was moved to Site…

Smallest, densest white dwarf ever discovered packs the sun’s mass into a moon-size stellar corpse

Astronomers may have discovered the smallest and heaviest white dwarf star ever seen, a smoldering ember about the size of our moon but 450,000 times more massive than Earth, a new study finds. White dwarfs are usually about the size of Earth and are the cool, dim cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. Our sun will one day become a white dwarf, as will about 97% of all stars. Although the sun is alone in space without a stellar partner, many stars orbit around each other…