Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11049

Physicists engaged in the construction of a nuclotron-based ion collider (NICA) facility in Dubna, outside Moscow plan to combine efforts to create of a unique electron positron collider at Novosibirsk’s Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics. Promoters say the project would allow Russia to take the lead in a very promising niche of particle physics.

Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics Deputy Director Yevgeny Levichev discussed Russian physicists’ ambitious plans with Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency on Tuesday.

The Institute plans to create the Super Tau Charm Factory, a particle accelerator which would study the collision of beams of electrons (matter) and positrons (antimatter) in an effort to help to identify phenomena and processes beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Read more

Germany had so much renewable energy last week that customers were briefly being paid to consume electricity, it has been reported.

As spotted by Quartz, who cite data from German think tank Agora Energiewende, fair weather and high winds on Sunday 8 May saw wind, solar and hydroelectric power plants producing 54.6GW of power, roughly 80 per cent of the 68.4GW of power being consumed across the country at that time.

As a result, the price of power plummeted, and went negative from 7AM to 5PM, bottoming out at -€130 per MWh at 1PM. Energy providers were essentially being paid by producers to take the electricity off their hands.

Read more

In Brief Scientists from the Imperial College have discovered that light could possibly exist in a previously unknown form, as a mix with a single electron. This interaction creates light that has the properties of both particles.

For something that seems so integral to our lives, we are still discovering many things about light. Its most fundamental properties still astound us, and its interactions with other particles are full of surprises. Case in point, scientists from the Imperial College in London seem to have just discovered a new form of light, one made by combining light with a single electron particle.

This new form of light carries properties of both particles.

Read more

In Brief DARPA has created self-steering bullets which use a real-time optical guidance system to hit both moving and accelerating targets with high accuracy.

You may have seen the movie Wanted. Sure, the movie was almost unrecognizable from the Mark Millar comic book series it was very loosely based on. But that didn’t stop anyone from pretending to be a bullet-curving, badass, supervillain-with-a-heart sniper like Angelina Jolie after seeing it.

But the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) new self-steering bullet is about to change the pretend part into reality.

Read more

“By comparing clonal and sexual daughters from the same mothers, we found sexually produced offspring get less sick,” Auld said.

PARIS – From an evolutionary perspective, sexual reproduction could be seen as a nonstarter. Compared to cloning, which also exists in nature, it is a major waste of time and energy.

Think of the ungainly, preening peacock — an easy snack for tigers and wild dogs — strutting his stuff to impress the ladies.

Even without predators, sex and its attendant rituals can be dangerous, such as when stags butt heads or male lions fight for mating rights.

Continue reading “Sex exists to avoid disease, study demonstrates” | >

Last year – although a rather grim one by other measures – was a splendid one for research. From gravitational waves to cooing dinosaurs, we’ve uncovered a lot about the world around us, but as a remarkable new study has revealed, there’s a lot within us we’ve yet to discover too.

Writing in The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology, scientists have officially announced the discovery of a new organ inside the human body. That’s right, there’s a brand new organ hiding in our abdomen and it’s only just been classified.

Known as the mesentery (meaning “in the middle of the intestines”), it can be found in our digestive systems. Leonardo da Vinci actually gave one of the first descriptions of it back in the day, but until around 2012 it was thought to be a series of separate structures keeping the intestines attached to the abdominal wall, like a series of support girders.

Read more