Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 11407

A NASA-funded study has solved a longstanding mystery over the origin of X-rays that permeate space in our Solar System, but in doing so, it’s also discovered an entire group of high-energy X-rays that can’t be explained.

The research comes from a new analysis of data recorded by NASA’s DXL rocket mission, which took flight in 2012 to settle the question of what creates these low-energy X-ray emissions – called the diffuse soft X-ray background – in our corner of the galaxy.

At the time, there were two central hypotheses. X-ray emissions were known to come from solar wind, but scientists also thought they might originate from what’s called the Local Hot Bubble – a theorised region of hot gas that envelops our Solar System. But which was correct?

Read more

Out of all the pressures we face in our everyday lives, there’s no denying that the nature of time has the most profound effect. As our days, weeks, months, and years go by, time moves from past to present to future, and never the other way around.

But according to the physics that govern our Universe, the same things will occur regardless of what direction time is travelling in. And now physicists suggest that gravity isn’t strong enough to force every object in the Universe into a forward-moving direction anyway.

So does time as we know it actually exist, or is it all in our heads? First off, let’s run through a little refresher about the so-called arrow of time.

Read more

When the quantum computer was imagined 30 years ago, it was revered for its potential to quickly and accurately complete practical tasks often considered impossible for mere humans and for conventional computers. But, there was one big catch: Tiny-scale quantum effects fall apart too easily to be practical for reliably powering computers.

Now, a team of scientists in Japan may have overcome this obstacle. Using laser light, they have developed a precise, continuous control technology giving 60 times more success than previous efforts in sustaining the lifetime of “qubits,” the unit that quantum computers encode. In particular, the researchers have shown that they can continue to create a known as the entangled state—entangling more than one million different physical systems, a world record that was only limited in their investigation by data storage space.

This feat is important because entangled quantum particles, such as atoms, electrons and photons, are a resource of created by the behaviors that emerge at the tiny quantum scale. Harnessing them ushers in a new era of information technology. From such behaviors as superposition and entanglement, quantum particles can perform enormous calculations simultaneously. The report of their investigation appears this week in the journal APL Photonics.

Read more

SEOUL: China is investigating executives of a North Korean bank believed to finance the illicit procurement of arms and materials related to the isolated country’s banned nuclear programme, South Korea’s JoongAng Daily reported on Monday.

China and the United States have agreed to step up cooperation in the U.N. Security Council and in law enforcement channels after North Korea’s fifth nuclear test on Sept. 9, the White House said last week.

While China is North Korea’s sole major ally, it disapproves of its nuclear and missile programmes.

Read more

Yesterday, in the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson analyzed a trio of recent books on humanity’s future in the larger cosmos. They were How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Space Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight; Beyond Earth: Our Path to a New Home in the Planets; and All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life.

Dyson is “a brilliant physicist and contrarian,” as the theoretical astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss recently told Nautilus. So I was waiting, as I read his review, to come across his profound and provocative pronouncement about these books, and it came soon enough: “None of them looks at space as a transforming force in the destiny of our species,” he writes. The books are limited in scope by looking at the future of space as a problem of engineering. Dyson has a grander vision. Future humans can seed remote environments with genetic instructions for countless new species. “The purpose is no longer to explore space with unmanned or manned missions, but to expand the domain of life from one small planet to the universe.”

Dyson can be just as final in his opinions on the destiny of scientific investigation. According to Krauss, Dyson once told him, “There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” Dyson told Krauss that, in order to measure one, “you’d have to make the experiment so massive that it would actually collapse to form a black hole before you could make the measurement.” So, Dyson concluded, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.”

Read more