Lifeboat Foundation

If you’ve been watching the recent UAP reporting or the US Congressional Committee Hearing on UAP, you already know that we have military and civilian pilot eyewitness accounts in volume, as well as footage of incidents like the “tic-tac” live sighting in 2004. There are many more incidents whose video recordings are still classified and not yet available to the public. There are reports and testimony from career Navy and Air Force officials who’ve reported similar sightings. Comments such as the one made by Cmdr. David Fravor (Ret), made after the 2004 incident are common among experienced military pilots.

We don’t have the kind of physics understanding, now or back then, that would allow us the ability to do what we’re seeing these UAP do. — US Navy Cmdr. David Fravor (Ret)

In research that could jumpstart interest into an enigmatic class of materials known as quasicrystals, MIT scientists and colleagues have discovered a relatively simple, flexible way to create new atomically thin versions that can be tuned for important phenomena. In work reported in Nature they describe doing just that to make the materials exhibit superconductivity and more.

The research introduces a new platform for not only learning more about quasicrystals, but also exploring exotic phenomena that can be hard to study but could lead to important applications and new physics. For example, a better understanding of superconductivity, in which electrons pass through a material with no resistance, could allow much more efficient electronic devices.

The work brings together two previously unconnected fields: quasicrystals and twistronics. The latter was pioneered at MIT only about five years ago by Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT and corresponding author of the paper.

John Baez University of California, Riverside The 20th century was, arguably, the century of physics. While there was immense progress on so-called fundam…

CERN’s data store has now crossed the remarkable capacity threshold of one exabyte, meaning that CERN has one million terabytes of disk space ready for data!

CERN’s data store not only serves LHC physics data, but also the whole spectrum of experiments and services needing online data management. This data capacity is provided using 111 000 devices, predominantly hard disks along with an increasing fraction of flash drives. Having such a large number of commodity devices means that component failures are common, so the store is built to be resilient, using different data replication methods. These disks, most of which are used to store physics data, are orchestrated by CERN’s open-source software solution, EOS, which was created to meet the LHC’s extreme computing requirements.

“We reached this new all-time record for CERN’s storage infrastructure after capacity extensions for the upcoming LHC heavy-ion run,” explains Andreas Peters, EOS project leader. “It is not just a celebration of data capacity, it is also a performance achievement, thanks to the reading rate of the combined data store crossing, for the first time, the one terabyte per second (1 TB/s) threshold.”

Researchers have utilized Alfvén waves to mitigate runaway electrons in tokamak fusion devices, offering significant implications for future fusion energy projects, including the ITER in France.

Scientists led by Chang Liu of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) is a collaborative national laboratory for plasma physics and nuclear fusion science. Its primary mission is research into and development of fusion as an energy source for the world.

Indirect observations of a strange isotope of nitrogen, nitrogen-9, could open new avenues of understanding of nuclear theory.

A group of researchers has discovered direct evidence of a new atomic nucleus that stretches what we understand of nuclear physics. Called nitrogen-9, this isotope contains seven protons and two neutrons and only exists for one billionth of a nanosecond. That is such a minute amount of time that it is difficult for scientists to agree if this really is an atomic isotope or not.

EzumeImages/iStock.

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A strange pair of galaxies several billion light-years away could be evidence of a hypothetical ‘crease’ in the Universe’s fabric known as a cosmic string.

According to an analysis of the properties of the pair, the two galaxies may not be distinct objects, but a duplicate image caused by a trick of the light. And the reason the light is duplicated could be because of a scar in the space between us and the galaxy, creating a gravitational lens.

A paper describing this cosmic string candidate, led by Margarita Safonova of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, has been accepted in the Bulletin de la Société Royale des Sciences de Liège, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

For those still holding out hope that antimatter levitates rather than falls in a gravitational field, like normal matter, the results of a new experiment are a dose of cold reality.

Physicists studying antihydrogen—an anti-proton paired with an antielectron, or positron—have conclusively shown that gravity pulls it downward and does not push it upward.

At least for antimatter, antigravity doesn’t exist.

Every so often, astronomers glimpse an intense flash of radio waves from space—a flash that lasts only instants but puts out as much energy in a millisecond as the sun does in a few years. The origin of these “fast radio bursts” is one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy today.

There is no shortage of ideas to explain the cause of the bursts: a catalog of current theories shows more than 50 potential scenarios. You can take your pick from highly magnetized neutron stars, collisions of incredibly dense stars or many more extreme or exotic phenomena.

How can we figure out which theory is correct? One way is to look for more information about the bursts, using other channels: specifically, using ripples in the fabric of the universe called gravitational waves.