Circa 2016
By using heat and temperature to modify the orientation of atoms, scientists have created a spongy, ultrastrong material that is lighter than a zip-close bag.
What if I were to tell you that passwords could be replaced by 1,000 trillion atoms to create an unclonable ID tag? Yeah, that.
NASA is actively monitoring a strange anomaly in Earth’s magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies above the planet, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.
This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for years, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers. The space agency’s satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field strength within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.
Continue reading “NASA Is Tracking a Vast, Growing Anomaly in Earth’s Magnetic Field” »
Have you ever spilled your coffee on your desk? You may then have observed one of the most puzzling phenomena of fluid mechanics—the coffee ring effect. This effect has hindered the industrial deployment of functional inks with graphene, 2-D materials, and nanoparticles because it makes printed electronic devices behave irregularly.
Now, after studying this process for years, a team of researchers have created a new family of inks that overcomes this problem, enabling the fabrication of new electronics such as sensors, light detectors, batteries and solar cells.
Coffee rings form because the liquid evaporates quicker at the edges, causing an accumulation of solid particles that results in the characteristic dark ring. Inks behave like coffee—particles in the ink accumulate around the edges creating irregular shapes and uneven surfaces, especially when printing on hard surfaces like silicon wafers or plastics.
The universe may have started with a Big Bang, but it will most likely end in an utterly anticlimactic way, slowly fading to black over trillions and trillions of years. Now, a theoretical physicist at Illinois State University has calculated what might just be the last interesting event that will ever happen – the explosions of stars called black dwarfs, which don’t even exist yet.
The ultimate fate of the universe is still up for debate, but one of the leading hypotheses is that it will undergo a “heat death.” Basically, all the stars will cool down and fizzle out, black holes will evaporate, and the never-ending expansion of the universe will stretch the fabric of reality so far that the remaining subatomic particles will rarely have the chance to whiz within a parsec of each other.
And now, thanks to theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, we have an idea of what might be one of the last things that will ever happen – black dwarf supernovae.
The Universe or any other phenomenon or entity contained therein is not objectively real but subjectively real. Patterns of information emerging from the ultimate code are what is more fundamental than particles of matter or space-time continuum itself all of which is levels below the Code. Nature behaves quantum code-theoretically at all levels. It’s hierarchies of quantum networks all the way down and all the way up. Being part of hierarchical quantum neural networks, a conscious observer system possesses a strange quality: collapsing quantum states of entangled conscious entities and having a privileged interpretation of that. From this perspective, entangled conscious agents would be a mirror conscious environment, whereas the quantum observer would be a central node of the entangled network.
“If we accept that the material universe as we know it is not a mechanical system but a virtual reality created by Absolute Consciousness through an infinitely complex orchestration of experiences, what are the practical consequences of this insight?” –Stanislav Grof
Just like absolute idealism, solipsism certainly defies our common sense but the deeper layer of truth is not what first meets the eye. Here’s what Richard Conn Henry and Stephen Palmquist write in their paper “An Experimental Test of Non-local Realism” (2007): “Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the illusion of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism.” One can extend their line of reasoning by arriving at pantheistic solipsism as a likely revelation to ponder about.
Continue reading “Philosophical Insights on Universal Consciousness and Evolving Phenomenal Mind” »
Observations of dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way have yielded simultaneous constraints on three popular theories of dark matter.
A team of scientists led by cosmologists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC and Fermi national accelerator laboratories has placed some of the tightest constraints yet on the nature of dark matter, drawing on a collection of several dozen small, faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way to determine what kinds of dark matter could have led to the population of galaxies we see today.
The new study is significant not just for how tightly it can constrain dark matter, but also for what it can constrain, said Risa Wechsler, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at SLAC and Stanford University. “One of the things that I think is really exciting is that we are actually able to start probing three of the most popular theories of dark matter, all at the same time,” she said.
A team of researchers from Heriot-Watt University, the Indian Institute of Technology and the University of Glasgow has demonstrated a way to transport entangled particles through a commercial fiber cable with 84.4% fidelity. In their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group describes using a unique attribute of entanglement to achieve such high fidelity. Andrew Forbes and Isaac Nape with the University of Witwatersrand have published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining issues with sending entangled particles across fiber cables and the work done by the team in this new effort.
The study of entanglement, its properties and possible uses has made headlines due to its novelty and possible applications —particularly in quantum computers. One of the roadblocks standing in the way of its use as an international computer communications medium is noise encountered along the path through fiber cables that destroys the information they carry. In this new effort, the researchers have found a possible solution to the problem—using a unique attribute of entanglement to reduce losses due to noise.
The work exploited a property of quantum physics that allows for mapping the medium (fiber cable) onto the quantum state of a particle moving through it. In essence, the entangled state of a particle (or photon in this context) created an image of the fiber cable, which allowed for reversing the scattering within it as a photon was transmitted. And furthermore, the descrambling could be achieved without having anything touch either the fiber or the photon that moved through it. More specifically, the researchers sent one of a pair of photons through a complex medium, but not the other. Both were then directed toward spatial light modulators and then on to detectors, and then finally to a device used to correlate coincidence counting. In their setup, light from the photon that did not pass through the complex medium propagated backward from the detector, allowing the photon to appear as if it had emerged from the crystal as the other photon.
A global research team has been able to transform brackish water and seawater into safe, clean drinking water in less than 30 minutes using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and sunlight.
In a discovery that could provide potable water for millions of people across the world, researchers were not only able to filter harmful particles from water and generate 139.5L of clean water per kilogram of MOF per day, but also perform this task in a more energy-efficient manner than current desalination practices.
The World Health Organization suggests good quality drinking water should have a total dissolved solid (TDS) of 600 parts per million (ppm). Researchers were able to achieve a TDS of 500 ppm in just 30 minutes and regenerate the MOF for reuse in four minutes under sunlight.
Most of the time, a material’s color stems from its chemical properties. Different atoms and molecules absorb different wavelengths of light; the remaining wavelengths are the “intrinsic colors” that we perceive when they are reflected back to our eyes.
So-called “structural color” works differently; it’s a property of physics, not chemistry. Microscopic patterns on some surfaces reflect light in such a way that different wavelengths collide and interfere with one another. For example, a peacock’s feathers are made of transparent protein fibers that have no intrinsic color themselves, yet we see shifting, iridescent blue, green and purple hues because of the nanoscale structures on their surfaces.
As we become more adept at manipulating structure at the smallest scales, however, these two types of color can combine in even more surprising ways. Penn Engineers have now developed a system of nanoscale semiconductor strips that uses structural color interactions to eliminate the strips’ intrinsic color entirely.
