Lifeboat Foundation

Starlab Space has chosen SpaceX to launch the private space station, Starlab, into low-Earth orbit (LEO) in just one flight.

Starlab Space is a transatlantic collaboration between Voyager Space and Airbus.

The announcement reveals that SpaceX’s Starship vehicle would undertake a single mission to transport the entire Starlab before the International Space Station’s (ISS) retirement, scheduled for 2030. However, the company’s release did not specify the launch date of Starlab.

The researchers claim to have achieved 18 percent energy conversion efficiency, trumping all previous achievements, with just a small change.

Researchers at UNIST have used an innovative method to improve the energy efficiency of organic QD solar cells to 18 percent. Previously, it had peaked at 13 percent.

Using this technique, even a non-conducting material like glass could be turned into a conductor some day feel researchers.

A collaboration between scientists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has developed a method that converts everyday materials into conductors that can be used to build quantum computers, a press release said.

Computing devices that are ubiquitous today are built of silicon, a semiconductor material. Under certain conditions, silicon behaves like a conducting material but has limitations that impact its ability to compute larger numbers. The world’s fastest supercomputers are built by putting together silicon-based components but are touted to be slower than quantum computers.

Continue reading “Tiny ‘bending station’ transforms everyday materials into quantum conductors” »

Join the discussion on this paper page.

Reverse Aging Revolution

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is crashing through a hailstorm of dust as it hurtles towards the sun at awe-inspiring speed.

The probe’s team members found that high-speed impacts with dust particles are not only more common than expected, they’re making tiny plumes of superhot plasma on the surface of the craft, according to an announcement for a new study.

The probe’s main mission goals are to measure the electric and magnetic fields near the sun and learn more about the solar wind—the stream of particles coming off of the sun, says David Malaspina, a space plasma physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Department and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Malaspina led the study, which the team will present at a conference this week.

Departure is now scheduled for no earlier than Monday (Feb. 5)

The physicists found that if electron transport alone is taken into account, the cuprates’ Lorenz number – their ratio of thermal conductivity to electrical conductivity divided by temperature – approaches the value predicted by the Wiedemann-Franz law. The team suggest that other factors, such as lattice vibrations (or phonons), which are not included in the Hubbard model, could be responsible for discrepancies observed in experiments on strongly correlated materials that make it appear as if the law does not apply. Their results could help physicists interpret these experimental observations and could ultimately lead to a better understanding of how strongly correlated systems might be employed in applications such as data processing and quantum computing.

The team now plans to build on the result by exploring other transport channels such as thermal Hall effects. “This will deepen our understanding of transport theories in strongly correlated materials,” Wang tells Physics World.

The present study is published in Science.

An idea derived from string theory suggests that dark matter is hiding in a (relatively) large extra dimension. The theory makes testable predictions that physicists are investigating now.