Lifeboat Foundation

There is a lot of speculation about the end of the universe. Humans love a good ending after all. We know that the universe started with the Big Bang and it has been going for almost 14 billion years. But how the curtain call of the cosmos occurs is not certain yet. There are, of course, hypothetical scenarios: the universe might continue to expand and cool down until it reaches absolute zero, or it might collapse back onto itself in the so-called Big Crunch. Among the alternatives to these two leading theories is “vacuum decay”, and it is spectacular – in an end-of-everything kind of way.

While the heat death hypothesis has the end slowly coming and the Big Crunch sees a reversal of the universe’s expansion at some point in the future, the vacuum decay requires that one spot of the universe suddenly transforms into something else. And that would be very bad news.

There is a field that spreads across the universe called the Higgs field. Interaction between this field and particles is what gives the particles mass. A quantum field is said to be in its vacuum state if it can’t lose any energy but we do not know if that’s true for the Higgs field, so it’s possible that the field is in a false vacuum at some point in the future. Picture the energy like a mountain. The lowest possible energy is a valley but as the field rolled down the slopes it might have encountered a small valley on the side of that mountain and got stuck there.

Macquarie University engineers have developed a new technique to make the manufacture of nanosensors far less carbon-intensive, much cheaper, more efficient, and more versatile, substantially improving a key process in this trillion-dollar global industry.

The team has found a way to treat each sensor using a single drop of ethanol instead of the conventional process that involves heating materials to high temperatures.

Their research, published in Advanced Functional Materials, is titled, ‘Capillary-driven self-assembled microclusters for highly performing UV detectors.’

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist, AI researcher, and philosopher. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Continue reading “Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans | Lex Fridman Podcast #392” »

Whether you find yourself laying awake at night crippled with anxiety regarding the embarrassing errors of your past, or just love Christopher Nolan’s non-linear storytelling, you may be shocked to learn about the latest scientific discovery. According to a recent write-up from Science Alert, time travel may actually be achievable, using the powerful time dilation of interstellar wormholes.

Catalytic molecules can form metabolically active clusters by creating and following concentration gradients—this is the result of a new study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS). Their model predicts the self-organization of molecules involved in metabolic pathways, adding a possible new mechanism to the theory of the origin of life.

The results can help to better understand how molecules participating in complex biological networks can form dynamic functional structures, and provide a platform for experiments on the origins of life.

One possible scenario for the origin of life is the spontaneous organization of interacting molecules into cell-like droplets. These molecular species would form the first self-replicating metabolic cycles, which are ubiquitous in biology and common throughout all organisms. According to this paradigm, the first biomolecules would need to cluster together through slow and overall inefficient processes.

New interference radar functions employed by a team of researchers from Chapman University and other institutions improve the distance resolution between objects using radar waves. The results may have important ramifications in military, construction, archaeology, mineralogy and many other domains of radar applications.

This first proof-of-principle experiment opens a new area of research with many possible applications that can be disruptive to the multi-billion dollar radar industry. There are many new avenues to pursue both in theory and experiment.

The discovery addresses a nine decades-old problem that requires scientists and engineers to sacrifice detail and resolution for observation distance—underwater, underground, and in the air. The previous bound limited the distance estimated between objects to be one quarter of the wavelength of radio waves; this technology improves the distance resolution between objects using radar waves.

The Belle II cooperation project at the Japanese research center KEK is helping researchers from all over the world to hunt for new phenomena in particle physics. The international experiment has now reached a major milestone after a team successfully installed a new pixel detector in its final location in Japan.

The size of a soda can, the detector was developed in order to make out the signals coming from certain types of particle decays, that can shed light on the origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry that has been observed in the universe. The installation ran without a hitch and is a key milestone in the evolution of the experiment and German–Japanese research collaboration.

Based at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan’s KEK research center, Belle II is an international collaborative project involving researchers from all over the world. The experiment aims to find answers to the many unresolved questions about the universe that are out there. To this end, the 1,200 or so members of the international Belle II collaboration are searching for signs of new phenomena in physics and unknown particles not covered by the established Standard Model of particle physics.

Rice University physicists have shown that immutable topological states, which are highly sought for quantum computing, can be entangled with other manipulable quantum states in some materials.

“The surprising thing we found is that in a particular kind of crystal lattice, where electrons become stuck, the strongly coupled behavior of electrons in d atomic orbitals actually act like the f orbital systems of some heavy fermions,” said Qimiao Si, co-author of a study about the research in Science Advances.

The unexpected find provides a bridge between subfields of condensed matter physics that have focused on dissimilar emergent properties of quantum materials. In topological materials, for example, patterns of quantum entanglement produce “protected,” immutable states that could be used for quantum computing and spintronics. In strongly correlated materials, the entanglement of billions upon billions of electrons gives rise to behaviors like unconventional superconductivity and the continual magnetic fluctuations in quantum spin liquids.