Lifeboat Foundation

An unusual semiconductor is making physicists rethink the science of extreme conditions.

Quantum objects make up classical objects. But the two behave very differently. The collapse of the wave-function prevents classical objects from doing the weird things quantum objects do; like quantum entanglement or quantum tunneling. Is the universe as a whole a quantum object or a classical one? Artyom Yurov and Valerian Yurov argue the universe is a quantum object, interacting with other quantum universes, with surprising consequences for our theories about dark matter and dark energy.

1. The Quantum Wonderland

If scientific theories were like human beings, the anthropomorphic quantum mechanics would be a miracle worker, a brilliant wizard of engineering, capable of fabricating almost anything, be it a laser or a complex integrated circuit. At the same token, this wizard of science would probably look and act crazier than a March Hair and Mad Hatter combined. The fact of the matter is, the principles of quantum mechanics are so bizarre and unintuitive, they seem to be utterly incompatible with our inherent common sense. For example, in the quantum realm, a particle does not journey from point A to point B along some predetermined path. Instead, it appears to traverse all possible trajectories between these points – every single one! In this strange realm the items might vanish right in front of an impenetrably high barrier – only to materialize on the other side (this is called quantum tunneling).

Most of the matter and energy in the Universe are in mysterious, invisible forms that cannot be explained by physics as we know it. But it is possible for us to uncover the dark side of the Universe, and CERN physicist John Ellis knows how.

John Ellis is a Maxwell prize-winning theoretical physicist, and is considered one of the world’s leading physicists. John is currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London, and since 1978 has held an indefinite contract at CERN.

The California Air Resources Board has issued an Executive Order for Toyota’s new hydrogen fuel cell swap kit for Class 8 heavy vehicles like semi trucks and busses. The kit turns diesel trucks into zero emission vehicles.

ChatGPT may get an incredible boost with applications like Auto-GPT, which aims to give autonomy to the chatbot.

Physicists believe most of the matter in the Universe is made up of an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see.

We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter”, the Universe as we see it would make no sense.

But the nature of dark matter is a longstanding puzzle. However, a new study by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, published in Nature Astronomy, uses the gravitational bending of light to bring us a step closer to understanding.

Protein-coding sequence differences have failed to fully explain the evolution of multiple mammalian phenotypes. This suggests that these phenotypes have evolved at least in part through changes in gene expression, meaning that their differences across species may be caused by differences in genome sequence at enhancer regions that control gene expression in specific tissues and cell types. Yet the enhancers involved in phenotype evolution are largely unknown. Sequence conservation–based approaches for identifying such enhancers are limited because enhancer activity can be conserved even when the individual nucleotides within the sequence are poorly conserved. This is due to an overwhelming number of cases where nucleotides turn over at a high rate, but a similar combination of transcription factor binding sites and other sequence features can be maintained across millions of years of evolution, allowing the function of the enhancer to be conserved in a particular cell type or tissue. Experimentally measuring the function of orthologous enhancers across dozens of species is currently infeasible, but new machine learning methods make it possible to make reliable sequence-based predictions of enhancer function across species in specific tissues and cell types.

In a new breakthrough, researchers at the University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with Ruhr University Bochum, have solved a problem that has caused quantum researchers headaches for years. The researchers can now control two quantum light sources rather than one. Trivial as it may seem to those uninitiated in quantum, this colossal breakthrough allows researchers to create a phenomenon known as quantum mechanical entanglement. This in turn, opens new doors for companies and others to exploit the technology commercially.

Tapping quantum weirdness to make an ultra-accelerometer.