Lifeboat Foundation

It’s now easier for scientists to create gene-edited insects thanks to a new technique called “direct parental CRISPR.”

The two materials, the researchers found, can be combined with water to make a supercapacitor — an alternative to batteries — that could provide storage of electrical energy. As an example, the MIT researchers who developed the system say that their supercapacitor could eventually be incorporated into the concrete foundation of a house, where it could store a full day’s worth of energy while adding little (or no) to the cost of the foundation and still providing the needed structural strength. The researchers also envision a concrete roadway that could provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel over that road.

The simple but innovative technology is described this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT professors Franz-Josef Ulm, Admir Masic, and Yang-Shao Horn, and four others at MIT and at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

MIT engineers created a carbon-cement supercapacitor that can store large amounts of energy. Made of just cement, water, and carbon black, the device could form the basis for inexpensive systems that store intermittently renewable energy, such as solar or wind energy.

Dumbphones seem to be making a return.

Call someone, right after a quick game of Snake.

“I view string theory as the most promising way to quantize matter and gravity in a unified way. We need both quantum gravity and we need unification and a quantization of gravity. One of the reasons why string theory is promising is that there are no singularities associated with those singularities are the same type that they offer point particles.” — Robert Brandenberger.

In this thought-provoking conversation, my grad school mentor, Robert Brandenberger shares his unique perspective on various cosmological concepts. He challenges the notion of the fundamental nature of the Planck length, questioning its significance and delving into intriguing debates surrounding its importance in our understanding of the universe. He also addresses some eyebrow-raising claims made by Elon Musk about the limitations imposed by the Planck scale on the number of digits of pi.

Continue reading “Unseen Fluctuations: Challenging Inflation | Robert Brandenberger” »

While the superconducting properties and strong electron correlations observed in two-dimensional moiré superlattices do not persist in the three-dimensional bulk material, the teams’ observed Brown-Zak oscillations suggest that the bizarre characteristics of the 2D systems can be adopted even within thick graphite stacks. There may be a path toward reintroducing these more fascinating properties into bulk materials, Yankowitz says.

Moreover, the persistence of certain 2D behaviors in such thicker structures may explain some odd behaviors of graphite that have been observed as far back as the 1970s. “The behavior of graphite in a very strong magnetic field has been a bit of a mystery for a long time,” says Allan MacDonald, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin, who did not participate in the work. “And these new papers may give a new handle on trying to understand what’s going on.”

This, Yankowitz says, opens up a new avenue of research in studying hybrid-dimensional materials. “Where this will lead right now is unclear, but it’s the foundation of understanding these new types of hybrid 2D-3D systems,” he says.

Computational imaging holds the promise of revolutionizing optical imaging with its wide field of view and high-resolution capabilities. Through the joint reconstruction of amplitude and phase — a technique known as “coherent imaging or holographic imaging” — the throughput of an optical system can expand to billions of optically resolvable spots. This breakthrough empowers researchers to gain crucial insights into cellular and molecular structures, making a significant impact on biomedical research.

Despite the potential, existing large-scale coherent imaging techniques face challenges hindering their widespread clinical use. Many of these techniques require multiple scanning or modulation processes, resulting in long data collection times to achieve a high resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. This slows down imaging and limits its feasibility in clinical settings due to tradeoffs between speed, resolution, and quality.

Water is a crucial and irreplaceable part of daily human life. As the world’s population expands and global temperatures rise, the demand for water proportionally increases.

In the last twenty years, worldwide water reserves have been depleting, even though the total storage capacity has expanded due to the building of additional reservoirs.

Led by Dr. Huilin Gao, associate professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University, researchers used a new approach with satellite data to estimate the storage variations of 7,245 global reservoirs from 1999 to 2018.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-…n-physics/

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That’s what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at “fundamental” physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it’s not really a “crisis” in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Continue reading “Mindscape 245 | Solo: The Crisis in Physics” »

In 1,846, astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier sat down and attempted to locate a planet that had never been seen before by humans. Uranus (grow up) had been moving in unexpected ways, as predicted by the Newtonian theory of gravity.

Though the discrepancies were small, there was a difference between the observed orbit of Uranus and the way Newtonian physics predicted its orbit to be. In July, Le Verrier proposed that the difference could be explained by another planet beyond Uranus, and made predictions as to the orbit of this previously unknown body.

Continue reading “Planet Vulcan: The Lost 19th Century World Einstein ‘Erased’ From Our Solar System” »