Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Collaboration can be a beautiful thing, especially when people work together to create something new. Take, for example, a longstanding collaboration between Arka Majumdar, a University of Washington (UW) professor of electrical and computer engineering and physics, and Felix Heide, an assistant professor of computer science at Princeton University.

Together, they and their students have produced some eye-popping research, including shrinking a camera down to the size of a grain of salt while still capturing crisp, clear images.

Now, the pair is building on this work, publishing a paper in Science Advances that describes a new kind of compact camera engineered for computer vision—a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to recognize objects in images and video.

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Superconducting materials are similar to the carpool lane in a congested interstate. Like commuters who ride together, electrons that pair up can bypass the regular traffic, moving through the material with zero friction.

But just as with carpools, how easily can flow depends on a number of conditions, including the density of pairs that are moving through the material. This “superfluid stiffness,” or the ease with which a current of electron pairs can flow, is a key measure of a material’s superconductivity.

Physicists at MIT and Harvard University have now directly measured superfluid stiffness for the first time in “magic-angle” graphene—materials that are made from two or more atomically thin sheets of graphene twisted with respect to each other at just the right angle to enable a host of exceptional properties, including unconventional superconductivity.

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New research shows that meteoroid impacts on Mars.

Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. It is a dusty, cold, desert world with a very thin atmosphere. Iron oxide is prevalent in Mars’ surface resulting in its reddish color and its nickname “The Red Planet.” Mars’ name comes from the Roman god of war.

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Researchers have discovered a method to induce chirality in non-chiral materials using terahertz.

Terahertz radiation refers to the electromagnetic waves that occupy the frequency range between microwaves and infrared light, typically from about 0.1 to 10 terahertz (THz). This region of the electromagnetic spectrum is notable for its potential applications across a wide variety of fields, including imaging, telecommunications, and spectroscopy. Terahertz waves can penetrate non-conducting materials such as clothing, paper, and wood, making them particularly useful for security screening and non-destructive testing. In spectroscopy, they can be used to study the molecular composition of substances, as many molecules exhibit unique absorption signatures in the terahertz range.

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Scientists are using tiny QR codes to track honey bee movements and gather groundbreaking insights into their foraging habits.

By monitoring thousands of bees, researchers have discovered that while most trips outside the hive are brief, some bees venture out for hours. This technology could revolutionize organic beekeeping by refining foraging range estimates and improving certification standards.

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Researchers introduce an innovative device that combines light emission and color control with clay compounds, offering a versatile solution for multifunctional displays.

The field of display technology is on the verge of a major breakthrough, driven by the growing interest in electrochemical stimuli-responsive materials. These materials can undergo rapid electrochemical reactions in response to external stimuli, such as low voltage.

A key advantage of these reactions is their ability to produce different colors almost instantly, paving the way for next-generation display solutions. An electrochemical system consists of electrodes and electrolytes, and researchers have found that integrating luminescent and coloration molecules directly onto the electrodes—rather than within the electrolyte—can significantly enhance efficiency and stability in display devices.

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For decades, fusion researchers struggled with neutron isotropy, a key indicator of scalable plasma.

Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, along with solid, liquid, and gas. It is an ionized gas consisting of positive ions and free electrons. It was first described by chemist Irving Langmuir in the 1920s.

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Simulations of a potential impact by a hill-sized space rock event next century have revealed the rough ride humanity would be in for, hinting at what it’d take for us to survive such a catastrophe.

It’s been a long, long time since Earth has been smacked by a large asteroid, but that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear. Space is teeming with rocks, and many of those are blithely zipping around on trajectories that could bring them into violent contact with our planet.

One of those is asteroid Bennu, the recent lucky target of an asteroid sample collection mission. In a mere 157 years – September of 2,182 CE, to be precise – it has a chance of colliding with Earth.

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Optical information encoded in holograms is transferred by means of ultrashort laser filaments propagating in highly nonlinear and turbulent media. After propagation, the initial optical information is completely scrambled and cannot be retrieved by any experimental or physical modeling system. Yet, we demonstrate that neural networks trained on experimental data provide a robust way to fully recover the original hologram images. Remarkably, our approach demonstrates the ability to decode intricate spatial information, marking a significant advancement in information retrieval from chaotic media, with applications in secure free-space optical communications and cryptography.

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