Toggle light / dark theme

With up to a million X-ray flashes a second, the laser will help study mechanisms in physics, chemistry, and biology.

The US Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has fired the first X-rays using the upgraded Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), a press release said. The upgraded version, dubbed LCLS-II, was built for $1.1 billion.

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford has been building and operating powerful tools for advancing science for over six decades. The original LCLS was the world’s first XFEL, reaching its first light in April 2009.

Human writing and drawing dates back at least 30,000 years and incorporates traditional techniques such as carving, engraving, and printing/writing with ink, as well as more novel methods such as electron lithography. Now a team of German physicists has figured out a unique method for writing in water and other fluid substrates, according to a recent paper published in the journal Small.

According to the authors, most classical writing methods involve the same basic approach, in which a line is carved out or ink deposited. On a solid substrate, strong intermolecular forces help the written figures hold their shape, but that’s not the case for surfaces submerged in fluids. Prior research has used scanning probe lithography to “write’ on self-assembled monolayers submerged in fluids, or to bring structures at the micron scale using two-photon polymerization. ” There are now even commercial scuba diver slates available for underwater writing on a substrate,” they wrote.

All of these methods still rely on a substrate, however. The German team wanted to devise a means of literally writing into a fluid. Such a method would need to be robust enough to counter the rapid dispersion of drawn lines, and they would need a very tiny pen that didn’t stir up lots of turbulence as it moved through the fluid medium. (The smaller the object moving through a fluid, the fewer vortices, or eddies, it will create.)

The universe is bigger than you think.

This means any deep-space future awaiting humanity outside our solar system will remain beyond the span of a single life until we develop a means of propulsion that outclasses conventional rockets. And, when three studies rocked the world earlier this year, it felt like a dream come true: Warp drive was no longer science fiction, potentially unlocking a theoretical basis to build faster-than-light warp drive engines that could cut a trip to Mars down to minutes.

However, a recent study shared in a preprint journal cast doubt on the theory, pointing to a gap in the math that could put the viability of a physical warp drive back into the realm of speculation.

A 65-year old perplexing question may have finally been answered: Why is the Sun’s atmosphere hotter than its surface?

For over six decades, scientists have been baffled by a cosmic mystery of scorching proportions: Why is the Sun’s atmosphere, known as the corona, hotter than its surface?

This enigma contradicting conventional wisdom that things cool down the farther they are from a heat source has puzzled solar physicists until now, revealed the European Space Agency.

After years of dedicated research and over 5 million supercomputer computing hours, a team has created the world’s first high-resolution 3D radiation hydrodynamics simulations for exotic supernovae. This work is reported in The Astrophysical Journal.

Ke-Jung Chen at Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan, led an international team and used the powerful supercomputers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan to make the breakthrough.

Supernova explosions are the most spectacular endings for massive stars, as they conclude their in a self-destructive manner, instantaneously releasing brightness equivalent to billions of suns, illuminating the entire universe.

When Isaac Newton inscribed onto parchment his now-famed laws of motion in 1,687, he could have only hoped we’d be discussing them three centuries later.

Writing in Latin, Newton outlined three universal principles describing how the motion of objects is governed in our Universe, which have been translated, transcribed, discussed and debated at length.

But according to a philosopher of language and mathematics, we might have been interpreting Newton’s precise wording of his first law of motion slightly wrong all along.

Some of the world’s leading physicists believe they have found startling new evidence showing the existence of universes other than our own. See more in Season 3, Episode 2, “Parallel Universes.”

#TheUniverse.

Subscribe for more from The Universe and other great The HISTORY Channel shows:
http://histv.co/SubscribeHistoryYT

Find out more about the show and watch full episodes on our site: