Lifeboat Foundation

The core–mantle boundary (CMB) is the interface between the Earth’s iron metal core and the thick rocky layer of mantle just above the core. It is a world of extremes—temperatures thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and pressures over a million times the pressure at the surface of the Earth. While it may seem far away from our environment on Earth’s surface, plumes of material from the CMB can ascend upwards through the planet over tens of millions of years, influencing the chemistry, geologic structure, and plate tectonics of the surface world where we live.

Though scientists cannot travel to the center of the Earth to study the CMB, they can get clues about what lies beneath the planet’s surface by measuring earthquakes. Seismic waves travel at different speeds depending on the material they are traveling through, allowing researchers to infer what lies deep below the surface using seismic signatures. This is analogous to how ultrasound uses waves of sound to image inside of the human body.

Recent research shows that the base of Earth’s mantle is actually complex and heterogeneous—in particular, there are mountain-like regions where seismic waves mysteriously slow down. These blobs, named ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs) and first discovered by Caltech’s Don Helmberger, are dozens of kilometers thick and lie around 3,000 kilometers beneath our feet.

For the first time in space, scientists have produced a mixture of two quantum gases made of two types of atoms. Accomplished with NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, the achievement marks another step toward bringing quantum technologies currently available only on Earth into space.

Physicists at Leibniz University Hannover (LUH), part of a collaboration led by Prof. Nicholas Bigelow, University of Rochester, provided the theoretical calculations necessary for this achievement. While quantum tools are already used in everything from cell phones to GPS to medical devices, in the future, quantum tools could be used to enhance the study of planets, including our own, as well as to help solve mysteries of the universe and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature.

The new work, performed remotely by scientists on Earth, is described in Nature.

Researchers created a quantum gas containing two types of atoms on the ISS, in a first for space-based research.

Abrain is nothing if not communicative. Neurons are the chatterboxes of this conversational organ, and they speak with one another by exchanging pulses of electricity using chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. By repeating this process billions of times per second, a brain converts clusters of chemicals into coordinated actions, memories, and thoughts.

Researchers study how the brain works by eavesdropping on that chemical conversation. But neurons talk so loudly and often that if there are other, quieter voices, it might be hard to hear them.

While the chemistry is different from traditional lithium-ion batteries, it’s part of a power pack with big advantages, including greater energy storage (estimated at up to 15 times that of lithium-ion) in relation to mass, a metric referred to as energy density.

Other perks include easy recyclability, being planet-friendly, and being cost-effective, per the ET report, which was written with benefits to the Indian market in mind.

“It is a long-range, budget-friendly, lightweight, and recyclable source of energy that can arguably be a saviour in the EV market,” Kriti Saraiya wrote for ET.

Misaligned AI is not the one you should worry most about (yet).

For the first time, scientists have used the concept of evolutionary traps on human societies at large. They find that humankind risks getting stuck in 14 evolutionary dead ends, ranging from global climate tipping points to misaligned artificial intelligence, chemical pollution, and accelerating infectious diseases.

The anthropocene era: success and challenges.

An international team of researchers has provided valuable insights into the brain’s noradrenaline (NA) system, which has been a longtime target for medications to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, and anxiety.

Equally important beyond the findings is the groundbreaking methodology that the researchers developed to record real-time chemical activity from standard clinical electrodes which are routinely implanted for epilepsy monitoring.

Published online in the journal Current Biology on Monday (Oct. 23), the research not only provides new insights into the brain’s chemistry, which could have implications for a wide array of medical conditions, it also highlights a remarkable new capacity to acquire data from the living human brain.

Our current best understanding of the universe requires the existence of an invisible substance known as dark matter. The exact nature of dark matter (or its actual existence) is still unknown, and there are multiple competing theories to explain the effect of this matter on the Universe. An exciting new one is called Recycled Dark Matter.

The idea behind Recycled Dark Matter is that dark matter is produced in a specific mechanism that researchers have dubbed “recycling” in a paper awaiting peer-review, because dark matter forms twice in the universe, with weird quantum mechanics and a black hole phase in the middle. All of that just a few instants after the beginning of the cosmos.

So, let’s take a journey back about 13.8 billion years. You don’t have to move, because the Big Bang happened everywhere. At the very moment that time as we know it starts ticking, the fundamental forces and the building blocks of particles we know of (the Standard Model) are in equilibrium with the Dark Sector (we know it sounds like a bad fantasy novel location, but bear with).

A significant milestone has been reached in the field of quantum chemistry.

The Cold Atom Lab facility equipped on the International Space Station (ISS) has successfully generated a quantum gas composed of two distinct types of atoms for the first time in space.