Lifeboat Foundation

Lasers support certain structures of light known as “eigenmodes.” An international collaboration of experts in gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.

Algorithm set for deployment in Japan could identify giant temblors faster and more reliably.

Two minutes after the world’s biggest tectonic plate shuddered off the coast of Japan, the country’s meteorological agency issued its final warning to about 50 million residents: A magnitude 8.1 earthquake had generated a tsunami that was headed for shore. But it wasn’t until hours after the waves arrived that experts gauged the true size of the 11 March 2011 Tohoku quake. Ultimately, it rang in at a magnitude 9—releasing more than 22 times the energy experts predicted and leaving at least 18,000 dead, some in areas that never received the alert. Now, scientists have found a way to get more accurate size estimates faster, by using computer algorithms to identify the wake from gravitational waves that shoot from the fault at the speed of light.

“This is a completely new [way to recognize] large-magnitude earthquakes,” says Richard Allen, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study. “If we were to implement this algorithm, we’d have that much more confidence that this is a really big earthquake, and we could push that alert out over a much larger area sooner.”

Continue reading “Gravity signals could detect earthquakes at the speed of light” »

Modern computers use electrons to process information, but this design is starting to reach theoretical limits. However, it could be possible to use magnetism instead and thereby keep up the development of both cheaper and more powerful computers, thanks to work by scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI) and University of Copenhagen. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

“The function of a computer involves sending electric current through a microchip. While the amount is tiny, the current will not only transport information but also contribute to heating up the chip. When you have a huge number of components tightly packed, the heat becomes a problem. This is one of the reasons why we have reached the limit for how much you can shrink the components. A computer based on magnetism would avoid the problem of overheating,” says Professor Kim Lefmann, Condensed Matter Physics, NBI.

“Our discovery is not a direct recipe for making a computer based on magnetism. Rather we have disclosed a fundamental magnetic property which you need to control, if you want to design a such computer.”

Rooftop coatings can keep homes cool — like cooling paper that helps radiate heat away. Or they can trap heat inside, keeping homes warm.

But what is the optimal rooftop coating for homes with both a hot and cold season?

Scientists have come up with an answer: an all-season covering that keeps homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

This week’s “Heard in the Milky Way” offers audio and video talks and interviews with leading astronomers and astrophysicists that range from Would Data from an Alien Intelligence be Lethal for Us to Neal Stephenson on Sci-Fi, Space, Aliens, AI and the Future of Humanity to Is Alien Life Weirder than We Think, and much more. This new weekly feature, curated by The Daily Galaxy editorial staff, takes you on a journey with stories that change our knowledge of Planet Earth, our Galaxy, and the vast cosmos beyond.

Unhackneyed compartmentalization generated by audible sound allows the enzyme reactions to be controlled spatiotemporally.

Spatiotemporal regulation of multistep enzyme reactions through compartmentalization is essential in studies that mimic natural systems such as cells and organelles. Until now, scientists have used liposomes, vesicles, or polymersomes to physically separate the different enzymes in compartments, which function as ‘artificial organelles’. But now, a team of researchers led by Director KIM Kimoon at the Center for Self-assembly and Complexity within the Institute for Basic Science in Pohang, South Korea successfully demonstrated the same spatiotemporal regulation of chemical reactions by only using audible sound, which is completely different from the previous methods mentioned above.

Although sound has been widely used in physics, materials science, and other fields, it has rarely been used in chemistry. In particular, audible sound (in the range of 20–20,000 Hz) has not been used in chemical reactions so far because of its low energy. However, for the first time, the same group from the IBS had previously successfully demonstrated the spatiotemporal regulation of chemical reactions through a selective dissolution of atmospheric gases via standing waves generated by audible sound back in 2020.

He is set to start a doctorate next.

13-year-old prodigy Elliott Tanner has graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in physics and mathematics.

For the past several years, scientists have been creating supersolids at very tiny scales in the lab. Now, a group of physicists have made the most sophisticated supersolid yet: one that exists in two-dimensions, like a sheet of paper. They published their results in Nature last Wednesday.

“It’s always been a sort of outstanding goal to bring [supersolids] into two dimensions,” says Matthew Norcia, a physicist at Innsbruck University in Austria, and lead author of the Nature paper.

So what exactly is a supersolid? At its base, it contains properties of two different states of matter, one mundane and another quite esoteric.

Circa 2021

With SpaceX continuing the testing phase for Starship and enthusiasm spreading for an actual crewed flight to Mars, an interesting magnetic thrust rocket concept conceived by physicist Fatima Ebrahimi at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) might make the mission much more cost effective.

Continue reading “Physicist designs magnetic thrust engine that could rocket us to the Red Planet” »