Lifeboat Foundation

Today the international LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) presented new measurements of rare particle transformations, or decays, that provide one of the highest-precision tests yet of a key property of the Standard Model of particle physics, known as lepton flavor universality.

Previous studies of these decays had hinted at intriguing tensions with the theoretical predictions, potentially due to the effects of new particles or forces. The results of the improved and wider-reaching analysis based on the full LHC dataset collected by the experiment during Run 1 and Run 2, which were presented at a seminar at CERN held this morning, are in line with the Standard Model expectation.

A central mystery of particle physics is why the 12 elementary quarks and leptons are arranged in pairs across three generations that are identical in all but mass, with ordinary matter comprising particles from the first, lightest generation. Lepton flavor universality states that the fundamental forces are blind to the generation to which a lepton belongs.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

A smattering of stars scattered throughout the center of the Milky Way is the remnants of the ancient galactic core, when our galaxy was still new.

Using measurements from the most accurate three-dimensional map of the galaxy ever compiled, as well as a neural network to probe the chemical compositions of over 2 million stars, a team of astronomers have identified 18,000 stars from our galaxy’s infancy, when it was just a compact collection of proto-galaxies coming together to dream of bigger things.

Hints of this stellar population have been identified in previous studies.

OWASSRF that threat actors are actively exploiting to gain arbitrary code execution through Outlook Web Access (OWA) on vulnerable servers that bypasses ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations.

A recent investigation by CrowdStrike Services found that Microsoft Exchange ProxyNotShell vulnerabilities are probably enabled the common entry vector for several Play ransomware intrusions:

The relevant logs were reviewed by CrowdStrike and no evidence of initial access exploiting CVE-2022–41040 was found.

The first measurements from a newly built gamma-ray observatory have been analyzed for signs of the decay of heavy dark matter, putting a lower limit on the hypothetical particles’ lifetime.

For a long time, researchers assumed that phonons could not contribute to the thermal Hall effect because of their lack of charge and spin. New work challenges this assumption.

How heat flows in interacting quantum many-body systems is one of the most interesting open problems in condensed-matter physics. Understanding thermal transport is particularly challenging in systems where charge-carrier contributions to energy transport are strongly suppressed, such as in insulators and superconductors. In such systems, heat transport cannot therefore be understood in terms of electronic carriers alone. In insulators, acoustic phonons are among the main energy carriers in an insulator. However, determining how and to what extent phonons contribute to heat transport in a material is the Achilles’ heel of interpreting thermal conductivity measurements. In particular, whether or not phonons can contribute to the thermal Hall effect—in which a temperature gradient in one direction produces heat flow in a perpendicular direction—remains an open question.

A pressing quest in the field of nanoelectronics is the search for a material that could replace silicon. Graphene has seemed promising for decades. But its potential has faltered along the way, due to damaging processing methods and the lack of a new electronics paradigm to embrace it. With silicon nearly maxed out in its ability to accommodate faster computing, the next big nanoelectronics platform is needed now more than ever.

Walter de Heer, Regents’ Professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has taken a critical step forward in making the case for a successor to silicon. De Heer and his collaborators have developed a new nanoelectronics platform based on graphene —a single sheet of carbon atoms. The technology is compatible with conventional microelectronics manufacturing, a necessity for any viable alternative to silicon.

In the course of their research, published in Nature Communications, the team may have also discovered a new quasiparticle. Their discovery could lead to manufacturing smaller, faster, more efficient and more sustainable computer chips, and has potential implications for quantum and high-performance computing.

For 70-year-old Lizy John from Bengaluru, Karnataka, nurturing a lush vegetable and fruit garden on her terrace has been highly rewarding and satisfying. Without a second thought, she credits her passion for farming to be the sole reason for staying healthy and energetic even at this age.

After running a snacks business for over 25 years, she decided to retire and focus on expanding her farming venture. Though there wasn’t enough space, she says that it wasn’t a challenge at all.

“Though we have a 1,200 sqft terrace, I grow my veggies in less than 1,000 sqft, as the solar panels and water tanks consume the rest of the space. But it was more than enough for me. I admit that I am happier and at peace ever since I started growing my own food at home,” Lizy tells The Better India.

Individual ants are relatively simple creatures and yet a colony of ants can perform really complex tasks, such as intricate construction, foraging and defense.

Recently, Harvard researchers took inspiration from ants to design a team of relatively simple robots that can work collectively to perform complex tasks using only a few basic parameters.

Continue reading “The physical intelligence of collectives: How ants and robots pull off a prison escape without a plan or a planner” »