Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

New evidence for a particle system that ‘remembers’ its previous quantum states

In the future, quantum computers are anticipated to solve problems once thought unsolvable, from predicting the course of chemical reactions to producing highly reliable weather forecasts. For now, however, they remain extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances and prone to information loss.

A new study from the lab of Dr. Yuval Ronen at the Weizmann Institute of Science, published in Nature, presents fresh evidence for the existence of non-Abelian anyons—exotic particles considered prime candidates for building a fault-tolerant quantum computer. This evidence was produced within bilayer graphene, an ultrathin carbon crystal with unusual electronic behavior.

In quantum mechanics, particles also behave like waves, and their properties are described by a wave function, which can represent the state of a single particle or a system of particles. Physicists classify particles according to how the wave function of two identical particles changes when they exchange places. Until the 1980s, only two types of particles were known: bosons (such as photons), whose wave function remains unchanged when they exchange places, and fermions (such as electrons), whose wave function becomes inverted.

Scientists use string theory to crack the code of natural networks

For more than a century, scientists have wondered why physical structures like blood vessels, neurons, tree branches, and other biological networks look the way they do. The prevailing theory held that nature simply builds these systems as efficiently as possible, minimizing the amount of material needed. But in the past, when researchers tested these networks against traditional mathematical optimization theories, the predictions consistently fell short.

The problem, it turns out, was that scientists were thinking in one dimension when they should have been thinking in three. “We were treating these structures like wire diagrams,” Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) physicist Xiangyi Meng, Ph.D., explains. “But they’re not thin wires, they’re three-dimensional physical objects with surfaces that must connect smoothly.”

This month, Meng and colleagues published a paper in the journal Nature showing that physical networks in living systems follow rules borrowed from an unlikely source: string theory, the exotic branch of physics that attempts to explain the fundamental structure of the universe.

Antiferromagnetic metal exhibits diode-like behavior without external magnetic field

Antiferromagnetic (AF) materials are made up of atoms or molecules with atomic spins that align in antiparallel directions of their neighbors. The magnetism of each individual atom or molecule is canceled out by the one next to it to produce zero net magnetization.

Researchers in Japan have now discovered that an AF material, NdRu2Al10, has the ability to produce a diode-like effect, meaning electrical current can flow in one direction but not the other (nonreciprocal), similar to the junction of two semiconductors. Their research is published in Physical Review Letters.

Dark matter and neutrinos may interact, challenging standard model of the universe

Scientists are a step closer to solving one of the universe’s biggest mysteries as new research finds evidence that two of its least understood components may be interacting, offering a rare window into the darkest recesses of the cosmos.

The University of Sheffield findings relate to the relationship between dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 85% of the matter in the universe, and neutrinos, one of the most fundamental and elusive subatomic particles. Scientists have overwhelming indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter, while neutrinos, though invisible and with an extremely small mass, have been observed using huge underground detectors.

The standard model of cosmology (Lambda-CDM), with its origins in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, posits that dark matter and neutrinos exist independently and do not interact with one another.

Plasma rings around M dwarf stars offer new clues to planetary habitability

How does a star affect the makeup of its planets? And what does this mean for the habitability of distant worlds? Carnegie’s Luke Bouma is exploring a new way to probe this critical question—using naturally occurring space weather stations that orbit at least 10% of M dwarf stars during their early lives. He is presenting his work at the 247th American Astronomical Society meeting.

The paper is also published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

We know that most M dwarf stars—which are smaller, cooler, and dimmer than our own sun—host at least one Earth-sized rocky planet. Most of them are inhospitable—too hot for liquid water or atmospheres, or hit with frequent stellar flares and intense radiation. But they could still prove to be interesting laboratories for understanding the many ways that stars shape the surroundings in which their planets exist.

THz spectroscopy system bypasses long-standing tradeoff between spectral and spatial resolution

Terahertz (THz) radiation, which occupies the frequency band between microwaves and infrared light, is essential in many next-generation applications, including high-speed wireless communications, chemical sensing, and advanced material analysis.

To harness THz waves, scientists rely on functional devices like metasurfaces and resonant gratings, which exhibit sharp and effective resonance features. Characterizing and optimizing these high-performance devices, however, remains a technical challenge.

The difficulty stems from a fundamental tradeoff when performing THz measurements: achieving high spectral resolution versus high spatial resolution. To accurately capture the narrow spectral fingerprints of certain gases and the features of devices with a high quality factor (Q), researchers need very high spectral resolution.

Language shapes visual processing in both human brains and AI models, study finds

Neuroscientists have been trying to understand how the brain processes visual information for over a century. The development of computational models inspired by the brain’s layered organization, also known as deep neural networks (DNNs), have recently opened new exciting possibilities for research in this area.

By comparing how DNNs and the human brain process information, researchers at Peking University, Beijing Normal University and other institutes in China have shed new light on the underpinnings of visual processing. Their paper, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggests that language actively shapes how both the brain and multi-modal DNNs process visual information.

Synchronizing ultrashort X-ray pulses for attosecond precision

Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have, for the first time, demonstrated a technique that synchronizes ultrashort X-ray pulses at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL. This achievement opens new possibilities for observing ultrafast atomic and molecular processes with attosecond precision.

Scrutinizing fast atomic and molecular processes in action requires bright and short X-ray pulses—a task in which free-electron lasers such as SwissFEL excel. However, within these X-ray pulses the light is internally disordered: its temporal structure is randomly distributed and varies from shot to shot. This limits the accuracy of certain experiments.

To tame this inherent randomness, a team of PSI researchers has succeeded in implementing a technique known as mode-locking to generate trains of pulses that are coherent in time. “We can now obtain fully ordered pulses in time and frequency in a very controlled manner,” says accelerator physicist Eduard Prat, who led the study, published in Physical Review Letters.

Going further with fusion, together

At 4 a.m., while most of New Jersey slept, a Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) physicist sat at his computer connected to a control room 3,500 miles away in Oxford, England. Years of experience running fusion experiments in the U.S. helped guide the U.K. team through delicate adjustments as they worked together to coax particles of plasma—the fourth state of matter—to temperatures that match those found at the heart of the sun.

This late-night, intercontinental collaboration happened many times from 2019 to 2024 during critical experiments at Tokamak Energy’s ST40 facility. It’s just one example of how PPPL is meeting the moment, leading collaborative efforts with private companies and other public institutions to make fusion power practical.

Fusion, the process of combining atoms to release energy, could be the source of a nearly inexhaustible supply of electricity. But there are still challenging scientific and engineering issues to overcome in the quest for power. That’s why scientists are increasingly working together to take fusion further.

/* */