Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the Northwestern University and Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences may have potentially come across a kilonova afterglow, the first of its kind ever to be observed, according to a university press release.

A kilonova is the merger of two neutron stars that creates a blast 1,000 times brighter than a classical nova. On August 17, 2017, astronomers observed the first-ever neutron star merger, GW170817, using light as well as gravitational waves. Ever since researchers across the globe have been pointing ground and space telescopes towards this event to study it across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Lattice confinement fusion eliminates massive magnets and powerful lasers.

After a burst lit up their telescope “like a Christmas tree,” astronomers were able to finally track down the source of these cosmic oddities.

The whimsical CEO who once disrupted the auto industry is no longer hiding his ambitions for a lucrative new industry.

Interfacing technology and electronics with the real world is often fairly tricky. Complexity and edge cases work their way in to every corner of a project like this; just ask anyone who has ever tried to operate a rover on Mars, make a hydroponics garden, or build almost any robotics project. Even those of us who simply own a consumer-grade printer are flummoxed by the ways in which they can fail when manipulating single sheets of paper. This robotic lawnmower is no exception, driving its creator [TK] to extremes to get it to mow his lawn.

[TK] actually had a platform for his autonomous mower ready to go thanks to a previous build using this solar-powered robot to explore the Australian outback. Adding another motor to handle the grass trimming seemed simple at first and he set about wiring it all up and interfacing it to the robot. After the first iteration he found the robot was moving too fast to effectively cut the grass, so he added a more powerful cutting motor and a gearbox to help the mower crawl more slowly over the lawn. Disaster struck when his 3D printed mount for the steel cutting blades shattered, but with [TK] uninjured he pushed on with more improvements.

Continue reading “Autonomous Mower Hits Snag” »

The Milky Way is blowing a star-forming bubble, and we’re in the middle of it.

Think “bubbles,” and you may think “soap” or “gum.”

Continue reading “The 1,000-light-year-wide cosmic bubble around Earth” »

Time crystals that persist indefinitely at room temperature could have applications in precision timekeeping.

We have all seen crystals, whether a simple grain of salt or sugar, or an elaborate and beautiful amethyst. These crystals are made of atoms or molecules repeating in a symmetrical three-dimensional pattern called a lattice, in which atoms occupy specific points in space. By forming a periodic lattice, carbon atoms in a diamond, for example, break the symmetry of the space they sit in. Physicists call this “breaking symmetry.”

Scientists have recently discovered that a similar effect can be witnessed in time. Symmetry breaking, as the name suggests, can arise only where some sort of symmetry exists. In the time domain, a cyclically changing force or energy source naturally produces a temporal pattern.