Lifeboat Foundation

Combustion engines, propellers, and hydraulic pumps are examples of fluidic devices—instruments that utilize fluids to perform certain functions, such as generating power or transporting water.

Because fluidic devices are so complex, they are typically developed by experienced engineers who manually design, prototype, and test each apparatus through an iterative process that is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. But with a new system, users only need to specify the locations and speeds at which fluid enters and exits the device. The computational pipeline then automatically generates an optimal design that achieves those objectives.

The system could make it faster and cheaper to design fluidic devices for all sorts of applications, such as microfluidic labs-on-a-chip that can diagnose disease from a few drops of blood or artificial hearts that could save the lives of transplant patients.

Until now, it was thought they came from massive star collapses.

Astrophysicists around the world may be shocked to learn that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) do not solely come from the collapse of massive stars. A new study by astrophysicists at Northwestern University upends the long-standing belief, uncovering new evidence that at least some long GRBs can result from neutron star mergers, which were previously believed to produce only short GRBs, the university’s publication reported.

It all began in December 2021 when the team detected a 50-second-long GRB (any GRB longer than 2 seconds is considered ‘long’).

Continue reading “New information about long gamma-rays shatters astrophysicists’ theory” »

Google today announced two new performance settings in its Chrome browser: Memory Saver and Energy Saver.

Modern browsers eat up a lot of memory and while that’s not a problem if you have 32GB of RAM, Chrome using multiple gigabytes of your memory can quickly slow your machine down if you’re on a machine with lower specs. The Memory Saver mode promises to reduce Chrome’s memory usage by up to 30% by putting inactive tabs to sleep. The tabs will simply reload when you need them again. The Energy Saver mode, meanwhile, limits background activity and visual effects for sites with animations and videos when your laptop’s battery level drops below 20%.

The experiment could help to form a unified theory of quantum gravity.

Scientists have, for the first time ever, made light appear to move simultaneously forward and backward in time. The new method, achieved by an international group of scientists, could help create novel quantum computing techniques and give scientists a better understanding of quantum gravity, a report from LiveScience.

It was achieved thanks to a combination of two principles that form a part of the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Continue reading “In a world first, physicists move light back and forth in time simultaneously” »

This research could potentially lead to a better understanding of the galaxy and its many mysteries.

It’s a cosmic riddle: How can galaxies remain together when all the matter we observe isn’t enough to keep them intact? Scientists believe an invisible force must beat play, something so mysterious they named it “dark matter” because of its lack of visibility.

This mysterious presence accounts for nearly three times more than what we can observe — a startling 27% of all existence! The mysterious dark matter is a profound mystery to scientists, its existence making up nearly one-third of the universe’s energy and mass yet remaining elusive due to its ability to avoid detection.

Continue reading “Researchers plan to use quantum computers in search for dark matter” »

Neural Computing Interfaces will revolutionize the world. From aiding motor function recovery, to augmenting and transforming the future human users. In this video, we take a look at what good can come from this technology but also what dark horrors await this future.

One key objective of electronics engineering research is to develop computing devices that are both highly performing and energy-efficient, meaning that they can compute information quickly while consuming little power. One possible way to do this could be to combine units that perform logic operations and memory components into a single device.

So far, most computing devices have been made up of a processing unit and a physically separate memory component. The creation of a device that can efficiently perform both these functions, referred to as a logic-in-memory architecture, could help to significantly simplify devices and cut down their power consumption.

While a few of the logic-in-memory architectures proposed so far achieved promising results, most existing solutions come with practical limitations. For instance, some devices have been found to be unstable, unreliable or only applicable to specific use cases.

After recombining the superposed photons by sending them through another crystal, the team measured the photon polarization across a number of repeated experiments. They found a quantum interference pattern, a pattern of light and dark stripes that could exist only if the photon had been split and was moving in both time directions.

“The superposition of processes we realized is more akin to an object spinning clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time,” Strömberg said. The researchers created their time-flipped photon out of intellectual curiosity, but follow-up experiments showed that time flips can be paired with reversible logic gates to enable simultaneous computation in either direction, thus opening the way for quantum processors with greatly enhanced processing power.

Theoretical possibilities also sprout from the work. A future theory of quantum gravity, which would unite general relativity and quantum mechanics, should include particles of mixed time orientations like the one in this experiment, and could enable the researchers to peer into some of the universe’s most mysterious phenomena.

Frankly I’m pretty stoked about getting my brain inside a computer and living forever.