New Scientist - 09.11.2019

(Grace) #1
9 November 2019 | New Scientist | 17

Electric cars

Technology Astrophysics

Sorry, sex won’t
start labour

Sex got you into this – can
it get you out? A review of
trials looking at whether
sex can induce labour has
found no evidence for this
commonly held view. In all,
the evidence from about
1500 women shows that
it makes no difference to
when labour starts (The
Journal of Sexual Medicine
doi.org/ddhs).

Smallest ever
black hole spotted

A search for black holes has
uncovered the smallest yet
seen at only 3.3 times the
mass of the sun. It is about
10,000 light years away
from Earth, where it orbits
a giant star about once
every 83 days. Despite its
mass, the black hole is only
about 20 kilometres across


  • roughly the length of
    Manhattan in New York
    (Science, doi.org/ddht).


Cancer drug takes
aim at mutation

An experimental cancer
drug targets a genetic
mutation involved in a
range of common and rare
cancers, including some
colorectal and lung cancers.
In tests, the drug removed
tumours in eight out of
10 mice and shrank them
in two out of four people
(Nature, doi.org/ddhm).

Warm batteries key
to a very fast charge

OWNERS of electric vehicles may
soon be able to fully charge their
cars in just 10 minutes, thanks to a
new design that heats up batteries.
One offputting aspect of electric
cars is the length of time it takes to
recharge them. Ideally, we need
batteries that can reach 80 per
cent charge – which gives a range
of roughly 300 kilometres – within
10 minutes, says Chao-Yang Wang
at Penn State University.
At the moment, when lithium

ARTIFICIAL intelligence can play
the real-time strategy video game
StarCraft II so well that it is better
than nearly all human players.
The AI, called AlphaStar, was
developed by tech firm DeepMind.
It competed anonymously against
people in a series of online games
on the official StarCraft II game
server, Battle.net, and ended up
ranked in the top 200 players for
each of the leagues it was in.
In January, an earlier version of
AlphaStar beat two of the world’s
top professional players of the
same title, but at the time it was
given advantages, such as the
ability to see the entire game map.

To level the playing field, this time
AlphaStar was restricted to what
human players can see, stopping it
from completing actions in multiple
locations simultaneously, said Oriol
Vinyals at DeepMind in a press
conference. The number of actions
was also restricted, so it wasn’t able
to click at superhuman speed.
This version of AlphaStar was
then pitted against human players
in various locations. In the European
league, it was in the top 0.2 per cent
of approximately 90,000 players
(Nature, doi.org/ggb9jx).
“It’s an extremely impressive
achievement,” says Julian Togelius
at New York University. Donna Lu

ion batteries are charged rapidly,
there is a tendency for lithium to
form plate-like deposits on the
negative electrode’s surface.
This can shorten battery life.
Wang and his team suspected
they could minimise this problem
by first heating the battery to a
temperature too high to allow
lithium plating to form.
To test this, they took an
industrial battery and inserted
micron-thick nickel foils in a stack
of electrode layers. This structure
allows the electrode to heat in
less than 30 seconds, setting up
conditions for ions to move

Vast stellar blasts
mimicked on Earth

WHAT happens when a star
explodes? Surprisingly, the same
thing that happens when gas
explodes here on Earth.
For gas explosions to occur,
there needs to be a build-up of
pressure. Alexei Poludnenko at
the University of Connecticut and
his team wanted to find out how
this can happen in unconfined
spaces, such as in a type Ia
supernova, when a small star
called a white dwarf detonates.
Poludnenko and his colleagues
wondered whether there were
similarities between these events
and unconfined explosions on
Earth. To investigate, they ignited
a mix of methane and air in a lab
facility and measured the pressure
of the resulting explosion with
sensors, while also tracking the
speed of the flames. They then
compared this with a computer
simulation of a type Ia supernova.
They found that igniting the
gas mix created fast turbulence,
stirring up the flames and making
the burning more vigorous,. Once
the burning is fast enough, this
creates pressure so quickly that
it doesn’t have time to dissipate,
eventually causing a detonation.
The team says the same process
seems to be behind supernovae
(Science, doi.org/ddhr). LL

quickly into the negative
electrode without lithium plating.
Then, they tested how well
the cells worked when they
were charged at either 40°C,
49°C or 60°C, and compared
the performance with a control
battery charging at 20°C.
They found heating the
electrode to 60°C was best,
allowing the battery to recharge
through 2500 cycles without
forming lithium plates. That
is equivalent to 14 years of use
or around 750,000 kilometres
of driving, says Wang. (Joule,
doi.org/ddmh) RPS

AI conquers most players of


hit video game in a fair fight


CAIAIMAGE/PAUL BRADBURY/GETTY


ALPHASTAR

Really brief


New Scientist Daily
Get the latest scientific discoveries in your inbox
newscientist.com/sign-up
Free download pdf