Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2016

A set of new laser systems and proposed upgrades at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will propel long-term plans for a more compact and affordable ultrahigh-energy particle collider.

Progress on these laser systems and laser-driven accelerators could also provide many spinoffs, such as a new tool to hunt for radioactive materials, and a miniaturized and highly tunable free-electron laser system enabling a range of science experiments.

Continue reading “Laser R&D focuses on next-gen particle collider” »

SpaceX is closing out the year with an achievement that should help it keep on track to fly astronauts on board one of its spacecraft next year. The Elon Musk-led space company finished its tenth consecutive successful parachute system test yesterday, an important safety system milestone that should be a good indication that the latest design is just about ready for use with astronauts on board.

The parachute system is what’s used to slow the descent of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon commercial astronaut spacecraft on its return trip to Earth, once it enters the atmosphere. The current design is the third major iteration of SpaceX’s parachute for Crew Dragon, featuring upgraded materials and improved stitching for the best possible reliability and durability during flight.

Yesterday the team completed the 10th successful multi-chute test in a row of Crew Dragon’s upgraded Mark 3 parachute design – one step closer to safely launching and landing @NASA astronauts pic.twitter.com/nfFjnKygB4

With everything from cars, to trucks, to even airplanes going electric, the demand for batteries is going to continue to skyrocket in the coming years—but the availability of the materials currently used to make them is limited. So scientists at IBM Research have developed a new battery whose unique ingredients can be extracted from seawater instead of mining.

AMD has published its new FEMFX deformable materials physics library and made it available for anyone to use in games and other software development.

Here’s the first map of the magnetic mineral magnetite in the human brain. Turns out that our brain stem may be full of it.

Neal Francis Vanderee posted this {I declare the names of anyone whom I share their material if their name does not share with the posting} another amazing act and feat of physiological research… AEWR.

30 days after receiving the treatment, the mice with pancreatic cancer cells transplanted from humans experienced a 90% reduction in tumors.

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Circa 2018

Higgs and Goldstone modes are possible collective modes of an order parameter on spontaneously breaking a continuous symmetry. Whereas the low-energy Goldstone (phase) mode is always stable, additional symmetries are required to prevent the Higgs (amplitude) mode from rapidly decaying into low-energy excitations. In high-energy physics, where the Higgs boson¹ has been found after a decades-long search, the stability is ensured by Lorentz invariance. In the realm of condensed-matter physics, particle–hole symmetry can play this role² and a Higgs mode has been observed in weakly interacting superconductors^3,4,5. However, whether the Higgs mode is also stable for strongly correlated superconductors in which particle–hole symmetry is not precisely fulfilled or whether this mode becomes overdamped has been the subject of numerous discussions^{6,7,8,9,10,11}. Experimental evidence is still lacking, in particular owing to the difficulty of exciting the Higgs mode directly. Here, we observe the Higgs mode in a strongly interacting superfluid Fermi gas. By inducing a periodic modulation of the amplitude of the superconducting order parameter Δ, we observe an excitation resonance at the frequency 2Δ/h. For strong coupling, the peak width broadens and eventually the mode disappears when the Cooper pairs turn into tightly bound dimers signalling the eventual instability of the Higgs mode.

Two entrepreneurs from Mexico have created vegan leather out of cactus leaves. The cruelty-free leather is called Desserto.

Adrián López Velarde and Marte Cázarez are said to be the first to create organic leather out of only nopal (prickly-pear) cactus. They don’t use toxic chemicals, phthalates, or PVC in their design.

The vegan leather is partially biodegradable. It’s flexible, breathable, and lasts for at least 10 years. The material feels like animal-based leather. Companies can use it in furniture, cars, leather accessories, and clothing.