Lifeboat Foundation

The discovery of superconductivity more than a century ago has significantly changed our world.

The story began in 1911 when the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes observed that the electrical resistance of mercury abruptly dropped to zero when it was cooled to a temperature of about 4 Kelvin (approximately 269°C)—a bit colder than the boiling point of liquid helium.

Continue reading “Making a superconductor liquid–solid out of the vacuum with hundred-exatesla-strong magnetic fields” »

Certain materials have desirable properties that are hidden, and just as you would use a flashlight to see in the dark, scientists can use light to uncover these properties.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego have used an advanced optical technique to learn more about a quantum material called Ta₂NiSe₅ (TNS). Their work appears in Nature Materials.

Materials can be perturbed through different external stimuli, often with changes in temperature or pressure; however, because light is the fastest thing in the universe, materials will respond very quickly to optical stimuli, revealing properties that would otherwise remain hidden.

Add a dash of creamer to your morning coffee, and clouds of white liquid will swirl around your cup. But give it a few seconds, and those swirls will disappear, leaving you with an ordinary mug of brown liquid.

Something similar happens in quantum computer chips—devices that tap into the strange properties of the universe at its smallest scales—where information can quickly jumble up, limiting the memory capabilities of these tools.

That doesn’t have to be the case, said Rahul Nandkishore, associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.

New research shows that atmospheric pressure fluctuations that pull gases up from underground could be responsible for releasing subsurface methane into Mars’s atmosphere; knowing when and where to look for methane can help the Curiosity rover search for signs of life.

“Understanding Mars’s methane variations has been highlighted by NASA’s Curiosity team as the next key step towards figuring out where it comes from,” said John Ortiz, a graduate student at Los Alamos National Laboratory who led the research team. “There are several challenges associated with meeting that goal, and a big one is knowing what time of a given sol (Martian day) is best for Curiosity to perform an atmospheric sampling experiment.”

The paper was published Jan. 22 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.

Scientists and engineers have been pushing for the past decade to leverage an elusive ferroelectric material called hafnium oxide, or hafnia, to usher in the next generation of computing memory.

Scientists outline new processes for leveraging the ferroelectric features of hafnia with the aim of enhancing high-performance computing.

“The model predictions highlight the accumulation behavior and residence time of microplastics in the gut,” said Karly McMullen.

How do microplastics impact marine ecosystems? This is what a recent study published in PLoS One hopes to address as a team of researchers from Canada and Ecuador used models to investigate how microplastics impacted the food webs of Galápagos penguin colonies that reside on the human-populated Santa Cruz Island. Their goal was to ascertain how these models could impact Galápagos species around the world, specifically the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, and holds the potential to help researchers, conservationists, and the public better understand the role of microplastics in ocean pollution.

For the study, the researchers examined the diet of the Galápagos penguin that is comprised of anchovy, salema, herring, sardine, and barracuda, and used a series of models to estimate how much the accumulation of microplastics within this prey and how much microplastics ended up in the penguins’ guts. In the end, the models predicted a stark rise in both the penguins and their prey, but specifically the penguins demonstrating the largest amount of microplastics per biomass.

Continue reading “Galápagos Islands Face Growing Concerns Over Microplastic Impact on Wildlife” »

A review discusses the current state of CRISPR-mediated genetic manipulation in human cells, animals, and plants and considers its future potential.

Year 2019 This proves that we may have infinite worlds and infinite possibilities.

Historically, correspondence rules and quantum quasi-distributions were motivated by classical mechanics as a guide for obtaining quantum operators and quantum corrections to classical results. In this paper, we start with quantum mechanics and show how to derive the infinite number of quantum quasi-distributions and corresponding c-functions. An interesting aspect of our approach is that it shows how the c-numbers of position and momentum arise from the quantum operator.

In physics, scientists have been fascinated by the mysterious behavior of superconductors—materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance when cooled to extremely low temperatures. Within these superconducting systems, electrons team up in “Cooper pairs” because they’re attracted to each other due to vibrations in the material called phonons.

As a thermodynamic phase of matter, superconductors typically exist in an equilibrium state. But recently, researchers at JILA became interested in kicking these materials into excited states and exploring the ensuing dynamics. As reported in a new Nature paper, the theory and experiment teams of JILA and NIST Fellows Ana Maria Rey and James K. Thompson, in collaboration with Prof. Robert Lewis-Swan at the University of Oklahoma, simulated superconductivity under such excited conditions using an atom-cavity system.

Instead of dealing with actual superconducting materials, the scientists harnessed the behavior of strontium atoms, laser-cooled to 10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero and levitated within an optical cavity built out of mirrors.