Lifeboat Foundation

The scent of coffee. The clarity of sunlight dappling through the trees. The howl of the wind in the dark of night.

All this, according to a philosophical argument published in 2003, could be no more real than pixels on a screen. It’s called the simulation hypothesis, and it proposes that if humanity lives to see a day it can repeatedly simulate the Universe using come kind of computer, chances are we are living in one of those many simulations.

If so, everything we experience is a model of something else, removed from some kind of reality.

Pulsars are known for their regularity and stability. These fast-rotating neutron stars emit radio waves with such consistent pulses that astronomers can use them as a kind of cosmic clock.

But recently a pulsar emitted gamma rays with tremendous energy. The gamma rays were the most energetic photons ever observed, with energies of more than 20 teraelectronvolts, and astronomers are struggling to understand how that’s possible.

The results were published in Nature Astronomy, which describes the burst of gamma rays emanating from the Vela Pulsar.

Some asteroids have measured densities higher than those of any elements known to exist on Earth. This suggests that they are at least partly composed of unknown types of “ultradense” matter that cannot be studied by conventional physics.

Jan Rafelski and his team at the Department of Physics, The University of Arizona, Tucson, U.S., suggest that this could consist of superheavy elements with atomic number (Z) higher than the limit of the current periodic table.

They modeled the properties of such elements using the Thomas-Fermi model of atomic structure, concentrating particularly on a proposed “island of nuclear stability” at and around Z=164 and extending their method further to include more exotic types of ultra-dense material. This work has now been published in The European Physical Journal Plus.

Researchers who have been working for years to understand electron arrangement and magnetism in certain semimetals have been frustrated by the fact that the materials only display magnetic properties if they are cooled to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

A new MIT study led by Mingda Li, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, and co-authored by Nathan Drucker, a graduate research assistant in MIT’s Quantum Measurement Group and Ph.D. student in applied physics at Harvard University, along with Thanh Nguyen and Phum Siriviboon, MIT graduate students working in the Quantum Measurement Group, is challenging that conventional wisdom.

The open-access research, published in Nature Communications, for the first time shows evidence that topology can stabilize magnetic ordering, even well above the magnetic transition temperature—the point at which magnetism normally breaks down.

If new particles are out there, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the ideal place to search for them. The theory of supersymmetry suggests that a whole new family of partner particles exists for each of the known fundamental particles. While this might seem extravagant, these partner particles could address various shortcomings in current scientific knowledge, such as the source of the mysterious dark matter in the universe, the “unnaturally” small mass of the Higgs boson, the anomalous way that the muon spins and even the relationship between the various forces of nature. But if these supersymmetric particles exist, where might they be hiding?

This is what physicists at the LHC have been trying to find out, and in a recent study of proton–proton collision data from Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), the ATLAS collaboration provides the most comprehensive overview yet of its searches for some of the most elusive types of supersymmetric particles—those that would only rarely be produced through the “weak” nuclear force or the electromagnetic force. The lightest of these weakly interacting supersymmetric particles could be the source of dark matter.

The increased collision energy and the higher collision rate provided by Run 2, as well as new search algorithms and machine-learning techniques, have allowed for deeper exploration into this difficult-to-reach territory of supersymmetry.

Quantum communications have rapidly progressed toward practical, large-scale networks based on quantum key distributions that spearhead the process. Quantum key distribution systems typically include a sender “Alice,” a receiver “Bob,” who generate a shared secret from quantum measurements for secure communication. Although fiber-based systems are well-suited for metropolitan scale, a suitable fiber infrastructure might not always be in place.

In a new report in npj Quantum Information, Andrej Kržič and a team of scientists developed an entanglement-based, free-space quantum network. The platform offered a practical and efficient alternative for metropolitan applications. The team introduced a free-space quantum key distribution system to demonstrate its use in realistic applications in anticipation of the work to establish free-space networks as a viable solution for metropolitan applications in the future global quantum internet.

Quantum communication typically aims to distribute quantum information between two or more parties. A series of revolutionary applications of quantum networks have provided a roadmap towards engineering a full-blown quantum internet. The proposed invention provides a heterogeneous network of special purpose sub-networks with diverse links and interconnects. The concept of quantum key distribution networks have driven this development to pave the way for other distributed quantum information processing methods to benchmark the technological maturity of quantum networks in general.

The positron, the antiparticle of the electron, has the same mass and charge as that of an electron but with the sign flipped for the charge. It is an attractive particle for scientists because the use of positrons has led to important insights and developments in the fields of elementary particle physics, atomic physics, materials science, astrophysics, and medicine.

For instance, positrons are known to be components of antimatter. They are also powerful in detecting lattice defects in solids and semiconductors and in structural analysis of the topmost surface of crystals.

Positronic compounds, namely bound states of positrons with regular atoms, molecules, or ions, represent an intriguing aspect of positron –matter interactions and have been studied experimentally via observation of positron annihilation in gases. It may be possible to generate new molecules and ions via the formation of positron compounds, but no research has ever been done from such a perspective.

🛑 A critical flaw (CVE-2023–22515) in Atlassian Confluence is being exploited by a nation-state actor, Storm-0062.

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