How, exactly, the laws of physics will crumble if NASA’s impossible space engine turns out to really work.
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Category: physics – Page 303
It’s one of the most fundamental compounds on Earth, and it makes up roughly 60 percent of the human body, and yet water is turning out to be stranger than we could have ever imagined.
Researchers have been investigating the physical properties of water, and found that when it’s heated to between 40 and 60 degrees Celsius, it hits a ‘crossover temperature’, and appears to start switching between two different states of liquid.
As a chemical compound, water is so vital to life on Earth, we’ve been underestimating how legitimately weird it is.
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ADELPHI, Md. — A U.S. Army Research Laboratory biotechnology scientist recently published an editorial article on the future directions of synthetic biology research to meet critical Army needs in the Synthetic Biology edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
In the publication, Dr. Bryn Adams, who works in ARL’s Bio-Technology Branch, highlights examples of robust, tractable bacterial species that can meet the demands of tomorrow’s state-of-the-art in synthetic biology.
“ACS Synthetic Biology is the premier synthetic biology journal in the world, with a wide readership of biologists, chemists, physicists, engineers and computer programmers,” Adams said. “A publication in this journal allows me to challenge the leaders in the field to meet a Department of Defense specific need — the need for new synthetic biology chassis organisms, or host cell, and toolkits to build complex circuits in them.”
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On October 5th 2016, Ranga Dias and Isaac F. Silvera of Lyman Laboratory of Physics, Harvard University released the first experimental evidence that solid metallic hydrogen has been synthesized in the laboratory.
It took 495 GPa pressure to create. The sample is being held in the cryostat in liquid nitrogen.
If as predicted by theory the metallic hydrogen remains metastable when the extreme pressure is removed then the world will eventually be greatly changed.
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In Brief:
- A Type IV civilization is a society that has managed to harness the energy of the entire universe.
- To get here, we would need to tap into energy sources unknown to us using strange laws of physics (laws that may or may not exist).
To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).
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Here’s something to think about — physicists have proposed that the Universe could have a ‘self destruct’ mechanism, whereby everything in existence could disappear forever at any time, without warning.
Yep, as the video by Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell above explains, if this self-destruct button turns out to be a real thing, it means we could be here one second, and gone the next, and we’d never even see it coming.
To understand this horrifying scenario, we first have to go through two of the fundamental principles of the Universe, the first being energy levels.
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In August Hacked covered the rumor, then confirmed by NASA, that a paper by the NASA Eagleworks team, titled “Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio Frequency Cavity in Vacuum,” to be published in December’s issue of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)’s Journal of Propulsion and Power, a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, will reveal promising experimental results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system. Now, a NASA Eagleworks paper that could be the December paper, or a draft, has been leaked.
The EmDrive results are often dismissed because they appear to violate the fundamental conservation laws of physics, but possible models for the anomalous thrust effect have been proposed that, while belonging to highly imaginative areas of theoretical physics, could explain the controversial results without violating fundamental conservation laws.
The leaked paper was first shared in the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive, and a Reddit thread that was then removed at the request of the Eagleworks authors, then posted with a commentary by tech news site Next Big Future. Of course, the paper could be removed again, and therefore those who want to read it before December might want to download it now.
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