Lifeboat Foundation

This is the second novel in “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”, the near-future trilogy written by China’s multiple-award-winning science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion — four centuries in the future. The aliens’ human collaborators have been defeated but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth’s defense plans are exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret.

Continue reading “The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (Part 2) — Science Fiction Audiobook” »

This is the second novel in “Remembrance of Earth’s Past”, the near-future trilogy written by China’s multiple-award-winning science fiction author, Cixin Liu.

In The Dark Forest, Earth is reeling from the revelation of a coming alien invasion — four centuries in the future. The aliens’ human collaborators have been defeated but the presence of the sophons, the subatomic particles that allow Trisolaris instant access to all human information, means that Earth’s defense plans are exposed to the enemy. Only the human mind remains a secret.

Continue reading “The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin (Part 1) — Science Fiction Audiobook” »

Considering a “computer” as anything that processes information by taking an input and producing an output leads to the obvious questions, what kind of objects could perform computations? And how small can a computer be? As transistors approach the limit of miniaturisation, these questions are more than mere curiosities, their answers could form the basis of a new computing paradigm.

In a new paper in EPJ Plus (“Towards Single Atom Computing via High Harmonic Generation”) by Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, researcher Gerard McCaul, and his co-authors demonstrate that even one of the more basic constituents of matter — atoms — can act as a reservoir for computing where all input-output processing is optical.

“We had the idea that the capacity for computation is a universal property that all physical systems share, but within that paradigm, there is a great profusion of frameworks for how one would go about actually trying to perform computations,” McCaul says.

Physicists used MINERvA, a Fermilab neutrino experiment, to measure the proton’s size and structure using a neutrino-scattering technique.

For the first time, particle physicists have been able to precisely measure the proton’s size and structure using neutrinos. With data gathered from thousands of neutrino-hydrogen scattering events collected by MINERvA, a particle physics experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, physicists have found a new lens for exploring protons. The results were published today in the scientific journal Nature.

This measurement is also important for analyzing data from experiments that aim to measure the properties of neutrinos with great precision, including the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.

Whether the light in our living spaces is on or off can be regulated in everyday life simply by reaching for the light switch. However, when the space for the light is shrunk to a few nanometers, quantum mechanical effects dominate, and it is unclear whether there is light in it or not. Both can even be the case at the same time, as scientists from the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and the University of Bielefeld show in the journal Nature Physics (“Identifying the quantum fingerprint of plasmon polaritons”).

“Detecting these exotic states of quantum physics on the size scales of electrical transistors could help in the development of optical quantum technologies of future computer chips,” explains Würzburg professor Bert Hecht. The nanostructures studied were produced in his group.

The technology of our digital world is based on the principle that either a current flows or it does not: one or zero, on or off. Two clear states exist. In quantum physics, on the other hand, it is possible to disregard this principle and create an arbitrary superposition of the supposed opposites. This increases the possibilities of transmitting and processing information many times over. Such superposition states have been known for some time, especially for the particles of light, so-called photons, and are used in the detection of gravitational waves.

On a cold winter day, the warmth of the sun is welcome. Yet as humanity emits more and more greenhouse gases, the Earth’s atmosphere traps more and more of the sun’s energy and steadily increases the Earth’s temperature. One strategy for reversing this trend is to intercept a fraction of sunlight before it reaches our planet. For decades, scientists have considered using screens, objects or dust particles to block just enough of the sun’s radiation—between 1 or 2%—to mitigate the effects of global warming.

A University of Utah-led study explored the potential of using dust to shield sunlight. They analyzed different properties of dust particles, quantities of dust and the orbits that would be best suited for shading Earth. The authors found that launching dust from Earth to a way station at the “Lagrange Point” between Earth and the sun (L1) would be most effective but would require astronomical cost and effort. An alternative is to use moondust. The authors argue that launching lunar dust from the moon instead could be a cheap and effective way to shade the Earth.

Continue reading “Space dust as Earth’s sun shield” »

This February sees the launch of Collision: Stories from the science of CERN, the culmination of a unique, two-year-long collaboration between fiction writers and pioneering physicists.

As part of Comma’s Science-into-Fiction series, the project paired award-winning UK writers with leading physicists and engineers working at CERN, to explore different aspects of CERN’s research, as well as its historical legacies, through fiction and accompanying essays (or afterwords) by the scientists.

The project began in the Summer of 2021 when particle physicists connected to CERN around the world were invited to be part of a new European-wide public engagement project. Over 150 topic submissions from scientists working on different aspects of science were received. Writers were then invited to respond to the list of ideas and were paired with the physicists whose ideas inspired them. We were overwhelmed with positive responses.

Quantum computing has entered a bit of an awkward period. There have been clear demonstrations that we can successfully run quantum algorithms, but the qubit counts and error rates of existing hardware mean that we can’t solve any commercially useful problems at the moment. So, while many companies are interested in quantum computing and have developed software for existing hardware (and have paid for access to that hardware), the efforts have been focused on preparation. They want the expertise and capability needed to develop useful software once the computers are ready to run it.

For the moment, that leaves them waiting for hardware companies to produce sufficiently robust machines—machines that don’t currently have a clear delivery date. It could be years; it could be decades. Beyond learning how to develop quantum computing software, there’s nothing obvious to do with the hardware in the meantime.

But a company called QuEra may have found a way to do something that’s not as obvious. The technology it is developing could ultimately provide a route to quantum computing. But until then, it’s possible to solve a class of mathematical problems on the same hardware, and any improvements to that hardware will benefit both types of computation. And in a new paper, the company’s researchers have expanded the types of computations that can be run on their machine.

When neutron stars collide they produce an explosion that is, contrary to what was believed until recently, shaped like a perfect sphere. Although how this is possible is still a mystery, the discovery may provide a new key to fundamental physics and to measuring the age of the universe. The discovery was made by astrophysicists from the University of Copenhagen and has just been published in the journal Nature.

Kilonovae—the giant explosions that occur when two neutron stars orbit each other and finally collide—are responsible for creating both great and small things in the universe, from black holes to the atoms in the gold ring on your finger and the iodine in our bodies. They give rise to the most extreme physical conditions in the universe, and it is under these extreme conditions that the universe creates the heaviest elements of the periodic table, such as gold, platinum and uranium.

But there is still a great deal we do not know about this violent phenomenon. When a kilonova was detected at 140 million light-years away in 2017, it was the first time scientists could gather detailed data. Scientists around the world are still interpreting the data from this colossal explosion, including Albert Sneppen and Darach Watson from the University of Copenhagen, who made a surprising discovery.