Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 2058

When Mickael Perrin started out on his scientific career 12 years ago, he had no way of knowing he was conducting research in an area that would be attracting wide public interest only a few years later: Quantum electronics. “At the time, physicists were just starting to talk about the potential of quantum technologies and quantum computers,” he recalls.

“Today there are dozens of start-ups in this area, and governments and companies are investing billions in developing the technology further. We are now seeing the first applications in computer science, cryptography, communications and sensors.” Perrin’s research is opening up another field of application: Electricity production using with almost zero energy loss. To achieve this, the 36-year-old scientist combines two usually separate disciplines of physics: thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.

In the past year, the quality of Perrin’s research and its potential for future applications has brought him two awards. He received not only one of the ERC Starting Grants that are so highly sought-after by young researchers, but also an Eccellenza Professorial Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNS)F. He now leads a research group of nine at Empa as well as being an Assistant Professor of Quantum Electronics at ETH Zurich.

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Perhaps the greatest and most frustrating mystery in cosmology is the Hubble tension problem. Put simply, all the observational evidence we have points to a universe that began in a hot, dense state, and then expanded at an ever-increasing rate to become the universe we see today. Every measurement of that expansion agrees with this, but where they don’t agree is on what that rate exactly is.

We can measure expansion in lots of different ways, and while they are in the same general ballpark, their uncertainties are so small now that they don’t overlap. There is no value for the Hubble parameter that falls within the uncertainty of all measurements, hence the problem.

Of course, most of the results depend on a long chain of observational results. When we measure using , for example, the result depends on the derived distances of these supernovae as found through the cosmic distance ladder, where ever greater distances are determined based on the distance of closer things.

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Robust hydrogels offer a promising solution for the development of artificial skin for bionic robots, yet few hydrogels have a comprehensive performance comparable to real human skin. Here, the authors present a general method to convert traditional elastomers into tough hydrogels via a unique radiation-induced penetrating polymerization method.

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Biologists from Konstanz have unveiled a unique and ancient phosphorus-based bacterial metabolism. Central to this discovery are four elements: an analytical calculation dating back to the 1980s, a modern sewage treatment facility, the identification of a novel bacterial species, and a remnant from around 2.5 billion years ago.

Our story begins at the end of the 1980s, with a sheet of paper. On this sheet, a scientist calculated that the conversion of the chemical compound phosphite to phosphate would release enough energy to produce the cell’s energy carrier – the ATP molecule. In this way, it should therefore be possible for a microorganism to supply itself with energy. Unlike most living organisms on our planet, this organism would not be dependent on energy supply from light or from the decomposition of organic matter.

The scientist actually succeeded in isolating such a microorganism from the environment. Its energy metabolism is based on the oxidation of phosphite to phosphate, just as predicted by the calculation. But how exactly does the biochemical mechanism work? Regrettably, the key enzyme needed to understand the biochemistry behind the process remained hidden – and thus the mystery remained unsolved for many years. In the following three decades, the sheet stayed in the drawer, the research approach was put on the back burner. Yet the scientist couldn’t get the thought out of his head.

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A rapid reshaping of orbits resulting from a close encounter with Jupiter or Saturn can lead Centaurs to exhibit comet-like activity, according to a Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Eva Lilly paper.

Centaurs are small bodies similar to asteroids in size but to comets in composition that revolve around the sun in the outer solar system, mainly between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune.

We have found some answers to the long-standing mystery of why some Centaurs became active like comets while the rest appear like regular quiet asteroids. Nobody knew why they behaved this way. It did not make any sense.

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