Lifeboat Foundation

A new species of tardigrade.

Hmm…hopefully it doesn’t get worse.

Can researchers use data science to accurately predict the future?

For COBOL programmers out there!

Job listings in parts of the US have started demanding COBOL knowledge. But what is this programming language?

Tempest is on its way to catch huge amounts of data as big as a city per second.

U.S. and Italian engineers have demonstrated the first nanophotonic platform capable of manipulating polarized light 1 trillion times per second.

“Polarized light can be used to encode bits of information, and we’ve shown it’s possible to modulate such light at terahertz frequencies,” said Rice University’s Alessandro Alabastri, co-corresponding author of a study published this week in Nature Photonics.

“This could potentially be used in wireless communications,” said Alabastri, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “The higher the operating frequency of a signal, the faster it can transmit data. One terahertz equals 1,000 gigahertz, which is about 25 times higher than the operating frequencies of commercially available optical polarization switches.”

In this vision of the future, commercial tourists can hop on board a craft and explore suborbital space.

In a new experiment, a team of French scientists created a levitating fluid that allows a tiny boat to float both on top of it — and another below it, seemingly flipping gravity on its head.

“That was a fun experiment,” Emmanuel Fort, professor at ESPCI Paris and co-author of a paper about the project published today in the journal Nature, told The New York Times. “Everything worked well. And I’m still amazed by the results.”

The third-order term Fpot(ρ)[ρq] Fpot(ρ)[ρq] above corresponds to the third-order energy in the structural expansion for electron systems. This energy plays an important role in the structural stability of metallic hydrogen ¹⁶ (Z= 1). This is because the kernel (10) has a strong wave-vector dependence, which cannot properly be treated in the square-gradient type theory. This brings a special stability of the structure in which as many equilateral triangles with q=3kF appear in the reciprocal lattice. It requires an anisotropic structure or a periodic modulation of the lattice for an atomic phase of hydrogen. Another possibility is to form a crystal with two ions in a unit cell (molecular phase). In any case, the atomic phase of bcc structure would not be realized just under the melting line as log as the third order term in F_c[ρ_q] does not suppress the effect. We shall investigate this problem numerically in the near future.