Lifeboat Foundation

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Today we will begin our look at the spaceships we might use for colonizing interstellar space in the future. In order to cover the vast distances between even the nearest stars in our galaxy within the boundaries of known physics, we need vessels able to voyage at high speeds for very long periods of time while carrying everything they need to colonize another solar system, a concept typically known as a space ark or generation ship. We will explore the challenges and options for such a vessel, as well as some alternative approaches to the problem.

“The World, The Flesh And The Devil” by J.d. Bernal:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.

Continue reading “Generation Ships” »

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Continue reading “Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?” »

Researchers in Switzerland show that hydrogen injections into magnetically-contained plasma can double to yield significantly more energy.

Aging binary systems could be giving birth to second-generation planets.

When a Sun-like star exhausts the helium fuel in its core, it enters its death throes. Starved for fuel, it swells to a red giant, likely swallowing its innermost planets, and begins burning scraps of leftover hydrogen to helium. Periodically, these helium ashes reignite, causing the star to once again burn brightly and throw off its outer layers into space.

This volatile phase of stellar life is called the asymptotic giant branch (AGB). With so much happening, it would seem like a terrible environment for the delicate process of forming planets. But over the past couple decades, astronomers have begun to suspect that under some circumstances, this stage could result in a new disk of material surrounding the star, giving rise to a second generation of planets.

Continue reading “Astronomers spot signs of planets forming around dying stars” »

Suspended Google engineer Blake Lemoine made some serious headlines earlier this month when he claimed that one of the company’s experimental AIs called LaMDA had achieved sentience — prompting the software giant to place him on administrative leave.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” he told the Washington Post at the time.

The subsequent news cycle swept up AI experts, philosophers, and Google itself into a fierce debate about the current and possible future capabilities of machine learning, other ethical concerns around the tech, and even the nature of consciousness and sentience. The general consensus, it’s worth noting, was that the AI is almost certainly not sentient.

TV robot fights are not just entertainment – they can also help turn students on to physics and engineering, as Robert P Crease finds out.

The two 110 kg combat robots squared off. One, known as Poison Arrow, was armed with a toothed spinning drum. Its adversary, Son of Wyachi (SOW), had whirling hammers. Poison Arrow smashed into SOW, sending it flying across the arena. SOW broke its radio receiver as it crash-landed, lying motionless as the referee declared a knockout.

Continue reading “Combat robotics” »

Physicists at QinetiQ are developing systems that combine and control high-energy laser beams to provide a powerful and cost-effective countermeasure against drones and other uncrewed objects.

Around the world interest is growing in using high-power laser beams to disable airborne invaders such as drones and other uncrewed objects. These so-called directed-energy systems have the potential to damage or destroy small aerial devices at a fraction of the cost of launching conventional defence missiles or munitions. They have the added advantage that they can be reused many times to counter multiple attacks as well as the growing threat of drone swarms.

At QinetiQ, a UK-based technology company specializing in defence and security solutions, around 10 years of research effort into the physics underpinning these directed-energy systems has demonstrated enough potential to start building and testing practical prototypes. “We have taken a high-risk, high-reward approach to developing these systems,” says Richard Hoad, capability area lead for novel effectors and resilience at QinetiQ. “Our company and our customers in the defence sector have just significantly increased their investment to enable us to prove that our solution is as effective in a wide range of real environments as it is in testing.”

A long-standing question in nuclear physics is whether chargeless nuclear systems can exist. Only neutron stars represent near-pure neutron systems, where neutrons are squeezed together by the gravitational force to very high densities. The experimental search for isolated multi-neutron systems has been an ongoing quest for several decades, with a particular focus on the four-neutron system called the tetraneutron, resulting in only a few indications of its existence so far, leaving the tetraneutron an elusive nuclear system for six decades.

A recently announced experimental discovery of a tetraneutron by an international group led by scientists from Germany’s Technical University of Darmstadt opens doors for new research and could lead to a better understanding of how the universe is put together. This new and exotic state of matter could also have properties that are useful in existing or emerging technologies.

The first announcement of tetraneutron was done by theoretical physicist James Vary during a presentation in the summer of 2014, followed by a research paper in the fall of 2016. He has been waiting to confirm reality through nuclear physics experiments.

Scientists at the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Dresden have come a step closer to the vision of a broad application of flexible, printable electronics. The team around Dr. Hans Kleemann has succeeded for the first time in developing powerful vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes. The results have recently been published in the renowned online journal Nature Communications.

High-definition roll-up televisions or foldable smartphones may soon no longer be unaffordable luxury goods that can be admired at international electronics trade fairs. High-performance organic transistors are a key necessity for the mechanically flexible electronic circuits required for these applications. However, conventional horizontal organic thin-film transistors are very slow due to the hopping-transport in organic semiconductors, so they cannot be used for applications requiring high frequencies. Especially for logic circuits with low power consumption, such as those used for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), it is mandatory to develop transistors enabling high operation frequency as well as adjustable device characteristics (i.e., threshold-voltage). The research group Organic Devices and Systems (ODS) at the Dresden Integrated Center for Applied Photophysics (IAPP) of the Institute of Applied Physics headed by Dr.