• NextApex
  • Posts
  • |NextApex| Quantum Dots: Prisms made of Electrons

|NextApex| Quantum Dots: Prisms made of Electrons

+ Power from Saltwater, Sesquiterpenes, HN Book Recommendations, Invent a Business where the people are LLMs.

Author

Vincent Pulling
October 08, 2023

NextApex 5: Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2023 for QUANTUM DOTS

“The discovery here is for actually purifying quantum effects to actually become materials you can touch.”

A quantum dot is like a prism made of electrons; the sizes can be adjusted so that the color emitted is different and their properties of semiconducting and so on are drastically different. “The discovery here is for actually purifying quantum effects to actually become materials you can touch.”

A New Class of Materials!

Nanofluidic device generates power with saltwater

There is a largely untapped energy source along the world's coastlines: the difference in salinity between seawater and freshwater. A new nanodevice can harness this difference to generate power.

Above: Nanofluidic device uses saltwater to generate power.

Below: Forests and trees release sesquiterpenes to help spur cloud growth.

A Revelation About Trees Is Messing With Climate Calculations

Trees make clouds by releasing small quantities of vapors called “sesquiterpenes.” Scientists are learning more—and it’s making climate models hazy.

web.archive.org/web/20230930090902/https://www.wired.com/story/a-revelation-about-trees-is-messing-with-climate-calculations

Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and synthesis of Quantum Dots:
(Our Feature Presentation)

U7

Semiconductors in liquid. As the size of the dot is adjusted, it is a raw number of electrons crowded together, and the varying dimensions

visualizing vascular system of a tumor

Quantum dots can be used to highlight and investigate vascular structures, which is many times more helpful than an x-ray when investigating soft tissue and non-bone related injuries.

Other things that will improve:

  • high quality illumination

  • QLED screens

  • solar panels

  • visualize vascular systems

Extracting Hacker News Book Recommendations with the ChatGPT API - reyem.dev blog

blog.reyem.dev/post/extracting_hn_book_recommendations_with_chatgpt_api

Above: Hacker News Book Recommendations! Someone extracted all the data.

Below: Using ChatGPT to design a Code Shop. That is, giving every character their own LLM-agent.

That is, they invent a business where the people are LLMs.

The results are amazing. [And worth noting: nowhere close to large-scale human output, but … coherent!]

Thanks for joining us again on NextApex, there was a ton of cool stuff happening the week of the Nobel prizes, so a lot got crammed into this one. Looking forward to seeing what we do in the future with Quantum Dots! Stay tuned and thanks a ton for being a part of NextApex!