Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Austria and Germany has shown that introducing environmental noise to a line of ions can lead to enhanced transport of energy across them. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe their experiments and why they believe their findings will be helpful to other researchers.

Prior research has shown that when electrons move through conductive material, the means by which they do so can be described by quantum mechanics equations. But in the real world, such movement can be hindered by interference due to noise in the environment, leading to suppression of the transport energy. Prior research has also shown that electricity moving through a material can be described as a wave—if such waves remain in step, they are described as being coherent. But such waves can be disturbed by noise or defects in an atomic lattice, leading to suppression of flow. Such suppression at a given location is known as an Anderson localization. In this new effort, the researchers have shown that Anderson localizations can be overcome through the use of environmental noise.

The work consisted of isolating 10 calcium ions and holding them in space as a joined line—a one-dimensional crystal. Lasers were used to switch the ions between states, and energy was introduced to the ion line using laser pulses. This setup allowed them to watch as energy moved along the line of ions from one end to the other. Anderson localizations were introduced by firing individual lasers at each of the ions—the energy from the lasers resulted in ions with different intensities. With a degree of disorder in place, the team then created noise by randomly changing the intensity of the beams fired at the individual ions. This resulted in frequency wobble. And it was that wobble that the team found allowed the movement of energy between the ions to overcome the Anderson localizations.

Continue reading “Environmental noise found to enhance the transport of energy across a line of ions” »

New ultralight hexagonal boron nitride material could be used in extreme-temperature applications such as spacecraft.

A NASA technologist is taking miniaturization to the extreme.

Continue reading “NASA to Advance Unique 3D Printed Sensor Technology” »

The recent SpaceX Raptor engine was actually a real breakthrough. It was a holy grail desired by NASA and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union almost had it, but when we landed on the Moon they stopped development. The engine is a “full-flow staged combustion” engine.

“Full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) is a twin-shaft staged combustion cycle that uses both oxidizer-rich and fuel-rich preburners. The cycle allows full flow of both propellants through the turbines; hence the name The fuel turbopump is driven by the fuel-rich preburner, and the oxidizer turbopump is driven by the oxidizer-rich preburner”

Followers of the Church of Elon will no doubt already be aware of SpaceX’s latest technical triumph: the test firing of the first full-scale Raptor engine. Of course, it was hardly a secret. As he often does, Elon has been “leaking” behind the scenes information, pictures, and even video of the event on his Twitter account. Combined with the relative transparency of SpaceX to begin with, this gives us an exceptionally clear look at how literal rocket science is performed at the Hawthorne, California based company.

Continue reading “The ‘Impossible’ Tech Behind SpaceX’s New Engine” »

NASA and engineers from the Department of Energy are developing small nuclear reactors that could power spacecraft and space colonies.

Five-thousand tons of water-ice delivered to cislunar space per two-year mission! In a recent announcement, TransAstra Corporation proposed a spacecraft able to achieve this. They call it the Queen Bee, a new part of the Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies (APIS; Apis) architecture. Queen Bee is a large scale version of their asteroid mining spacecraft design.

TransAstra is a Los Angeles, California based aerospace company founded in 2015 by Joel Sercel. Their goal is to help make industrial processes in space possible. A key process they study is extracting volatiles, including water, from small Near Earth Asteroids (NEA). Their past work has focused on Optical Mining, asteroid encapsulation, and solar thermal thrusters for the mining and utilization of carbonaceous Near Earth Asteroid (NEA) volatiles.

Mars One, the much-criticized proposal to colonize the Red Planet, has been declared bankrupt by a Swiss court.

Turns out it is smarter than we think.

It is well known that the circuits in this part of our nervous system, which travel down the length of our spine, control seemingly simple things like the pain reflex in humans, and some motor control functions in animals.

Now, new research from Western University has shown that the spinal cord is also able to process and control more complex functions, like the positioning of your hand in external space.

“This research has shown that a least one important function is being done at the level of the spinal cord and it opens up a whole new area of investigation to say, ‘what else is done at the spinal level and what else have we potentially missed in this domain?’” said the study’s senior and supervising researcher Andrew Pruszynski, PhD, assistant professor at Western’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and Canada Research Chair in Sensorimotor Neuroscience.

All hopes are on Mars to be the next big adventure for mankind, with groups like NASA working hard to make a manned mission to the Red Planet a reality and companies like SpaceX betting big on Earth-to-Mars travel.

SpaceX boss Elon Musk has long promised that living on Mars will be a reality within our lifetimes, even suggesting that he himself might move there at some point in the not-too-distant future. But once all the kinks are ironed out, how much is it going to cost to leave Earth behind and become a full-fledged Martian? Musk thinks he has the answer.