Physics – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Aug 3
2016

Gravitational Waves to Crack Neutron Star Mystery

As gravitational wave observatories become more sensitive, we may see the collisions of neutron stars and, possibly, find out what these stellar husks are really made of.

Aug 3
2016

Scientists are one step closer to understanding nuclear fusion power

Researchers have developed a new way to explore some of the most extreme environments in the universe by combining three separate branches of physics.

Jul 31
2016

Lab 2.0: Will Computers Replace Experimental Science?

We spend our lives surrounded by hi-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Thanks to Moore’s law and a number of developments in physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics over the past 50 years (leading to Nobel Prizes in Chemistry in 1998 and 2013) we can now carry out many experiments entirely on computers using modelling.

Jul 30
2016

Tesla Launches Gigafactory | Tesla Motors

“Building the world’s largest factory to accelerate a sustainable energy future.”

Jul 28
2016

Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift

An early sign that neutrinos behave differently than antineutrinos suggests an answer to one of the biggest questions in physics.

Jul 27
2016

A stunning prediction of climate science — and basic physics — may now be coming true

NASA researchers suggest sea levels may be plunging around Greenland because of ice loss and a resulting decline in gravitational pull.

Jul 27
2016

Did the LIGO gravitational waves originate from primordial black holes?

Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists.

If further data support this observation, it could mark the first confirmed finding of a primordial black hole, guiding theories about the beginnings of the universe.

In February, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced the first successful detection of gravitational waves.

Jul 26
2016

Welcome to Lab 2.0 Where Computers Replace Experimental Science

We spend our lives surrounded by high-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Thanks to Moore’s law and a number of developments in physics, chemistry, computer science and mathematics over the past 50 years (leading to Nobel Prizes in chemistry in 1998 and 2013) we can now carry out many experiments entirely on computers using modeling.

Jul 26
2016

Dimensional Reduction: The Key To Physics’ Greatest Mystery?

Perhaps looking at our Universe as three dimensions of space is too restrictive. What if we were more — and less — all at once?

Jul 26
2016

Engineer finds a huge physics discovery in da Vinci’s ‘irrelevant scribbles’

Until now, art historians dismissed some doodles in da Vinci’s notebooks as “irrelevant.”

But a new study from Ian Hutchings, a professor at the University of Cambridge, showed that one page of these scribbles from 1493 actually contained something groundbreaking: The first written records demonstrating the laws of friction.

Although it has been common knowledge that da Vinci conducted the first systematic study of friction (which underpins the modern science of tribology, or the study of friction, lubrication, and wear), we didn’t know how and when he came up with these ideas.