Lifeboat Foundation

Neutrinos created by LHC went undetected earlier, but FASER changed that and can help us learn more about deep space.

Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, commonly known as CERN, have detected neutrinos created by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment for the very first time. These were the highest energy neutrinos that were ever produced in a laboratory setup and are similar to those found in particle showers from deep space.

First detected in 1956, neutrinos are subatomic particles that play a key role in the burning of stars. Every time nuclei of atoms either come together (fusion) or break apart (fission) in the universe, neutrinos are released.

Continue reading “Neutrinos created by CERN Large Hadron Collider detected for the first time” »

The province, however, is seeking a solution to its future relevance taking baby steps of which CFGC is one. Having said this, it still is an important initiative that could have enormous Canada-wide impacts.

What is carbon fibre?

Carbon fibre is less than a tenth the thickness of human hair. It contains carbon atoms almost exclusively. It is lightweight yet strong and can be bundled with other carbon fibres, woven, pressed and moulded. Carbon fibre material can be turned into tubes for bicycles, tennis rackets, and golf clubs. As a sheet, it can be moulded and turned into body parts for automobiles and trucks. Today, it is in the wings of modern aircraft replacing aluminum and steel. It is in Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. And in construction, it can be used instead of concrete, brick, wood, and even steel.

Australian scientists have recreated a famous experiment and confirmed quantum physics’s bizarre predictions about the nature of reality, by proving that reality doesn’t actually exist until we measure it — at least, not on the very small scale.

That all sounds a little mind-meltingly complex, but the experiment poses a pretty simple question: if you have an object that can either act like a particle or a wave, at what point does that object ‘decide’?

Our general logic would assume that the object is either wave-like or particle-like by its very nature, and our measurements will have nothing to do with the answer. But quantum theory predicts that the result all depends on how the object is measured at the end of its journey. And that’s exactly what a team from the Australian National University has now found.

A joint research project’s findings have just been published in the journal Nature Materials from engineers from MIT, Caltech, and ETH Zurich that has yielded a “nano-architectured” material that could prove stronger than Kevlar and steel. This material, once scaled, could provide a means of developed lightweight, protective coverings, blast shields, and other impact-resistance materials and armors for various industries.

The material is less than a width of a human hair, but still able to prevent the tiny, high-speed particles from penetrating it. According to the researchers behind the project, when compared with steel Kevlar, aluminum rother impact-resistant materials of comparable weight, the new nanotech armor outperforms them all.

A biological method that produces metal nanoclusters using the electroactive bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens could provide a cheap and sustainable solution to high-performance catalyst synthesis for various applications such as water splitting.

Metal nanoclusters contain fewer than one hundred atoms and are much smaller than nanoparticles. They have unique electronic properties but also feature numerous active sites available for catalysis on their surface. There are several synthetic methods for making metal nanoclusters, but most require multiple steps involving toxic substances and harsh temperature and pressure conditions.

Continue reading “Electroactive bacterium generates well-defined nanosized metal catalysts with remarkable water-splitting performance” »

In recent years, a group of Hungarian researchers have made headlines with a bold claim. They say they’ve discovered a new particle — dubbed X17 — that requires the existence of a fifth force of nature.

The researchers weren’t looking for the new particle, though. Instead, it popped up as an anomaly in their detector back in 2015 while they were searching for signs of dark matter. The oddity didn’t draw much attention at first. But eventually, a group of prominent particle physicists working at the University of California, Irvine, took a closer look and suggested that the Hungarians had stumbled onto a new type of particle — one that implies an entirely new force of nature.

Then, in late 2019, the Hungarian find hit the mainstream — including a story featured prominently on CNN — when they released new results suggesting that their signal hadn’t gone away. The anomaly persisted even after they changed the parameters of their experiment. They’ve now seen it pop up in the same way hundreds of times.

Dibaryons are the subatomic particles made of two baryons. Their formations through baryon-baryon interactions play a fundamental role in big-bang nucleosynthesis, in nuclear reactions including those within stellar environments, and provide a connection between nuclear physics, cosmology and astrophysics.

Interestingly, the strong force, which is the key to the existence of nuclei and provides most of their masses, allows formations of numerous other dibaryons with various combinations of quarks. However, we do not observe them abound—deuteron is the only known stable dibaryon.

To resolve this apparent dichotomy, it is essential to investigate dibaryons and baryon-baryon interactions at the fundamental level of strong interactions. In a recent publication in Physical Review Letters, physicists from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and The Institute of Mathematical Science (IMSc) have provided strong evidence for the existence of a deeply bound dibaryon, entirely built from bottom (beauty) quarks.

The physicists Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger have won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments that proved the profoundly strange quantum nature of reality. Their experiments collectively established the existence of a bizarre quantum phenomenon known as entanglement, where two widely separated particles appear to share information despite having no conceivable way of communicating.

Entanglement lay at the heart of a fiery clash in the 1930s between physics titans Albert Einstein on the one hand and Niels Bohr and Erwin Schrödinger on the other about how the universe operates at a fundamental level. Einstein believed all aspects of reality should have a concrete and fully knowable existence. All objects — from the moon to a photon of light — should have precisely defined properties that can be discovered through measurement. Bohr, Schrödinger and other proponents of the nascent quantum mechanics, however, were finding that reality appeared to be fundamentally uncertain; a particle does not possess certain properties until the moment of measurement.

Entanglement emerged as a decisive way to distinguish between these two possible versions of reality. The physicist John Bell proposed a decisive thought experiment that was later realized in various experimental forms by Aspect and Clauser. The work proved Schrödinger right. Quantum mechanics was the operating system of the universe.

With the aid of some sea slugs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln chemists have discovered that one of the smallest conceivable tweaks to a biomolecule can elicit one of the grandest conceivable consequences: directing the activation of neurons.

Their discovery came from investigating peptides, the short chains of amino acids that can transmit signals among cells, including neurons, while populating the central nervous systems and bloodstreams of most animals. Like many other molecules, an amino acid in a peptide can adopt one of two forms that feature the same atoms, with the same connectivity, but in mirror-image orientations: L and D.

Chemists often think of those two orientations as the left and right hands of a molecule. The L orientation is by far the more common in peptides, to the point of being considered the default. But when enzymes do flip an L to a D, the seemingly minor about-face can turn, say, a potentially therapeutic molecule into a toxic one, or vice versa.