Lifeboat Foundation

Research from a team of physicists at the University of New Hampshire is advancing the understanding of how protons, which comprise 95% of the mass of the visible universe, interact with each other. The results provide a benchmark for testing the strong force, one of the four fundamental forces in nature.

“There’s a lot still unanswered about both of those things, the proton and the strong force,” said David Ruth, Ph.D. candidate in physics and lead author. “This brings us a little bit closer to that understanding. It’s a necessary piece of two very fundamental things in the universe.”

The strong force governs how what’s internal to the atom’s nucleus—neutrons, protons and the quarks and gluons that make them up—bind together. It is the least understood of the four fundamental forces of nature, which include gravity, electromagnetism and the weak force.

New observations could explain why star formation declines over time.

And with the help of citizen scientists, a team of astronomers recently discovered a unique black hole in a galaxy roughly one billion light-years away that’s hurling a relativistic jet at another galaxy.

The research was conducted by a team led by Ananda Hota, a researcher with the UM-DAE Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences. The paper that describes their findings was published on October 12th in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Continue reading “Scientists may have solved a massive galaxy mystery” »

Researchers examining post-mortem brains confirm a long-held hypothesis explaining neurotransmitter’s connection to a debilitating disorder.

How does the brain chemical dopamine relate to schizophrenia? It is a question that vexed scientists for more than 70 years, and now researchers at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development (LIBD) believe they have solved the challenging riddle. This new understanding may lead to better treatment of schizophrenia, an often-devastating brain disorder characterized by delusional thinking, hallucinations, and other forms of psychosis.

Through their exploration of the expression of genes in the caudate nucleus – a region of the brain linked to emotional decision-making – the scientists uncovered physical evidence that neuronal cells are unable to precisely control levels of dopamine. They also identified the genetic mechanism that controls dopamine flow. Their findings were published today (November 1) in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launched classified payloads for the U.S. Space Force on its fourth-ever mission on Nov. 1, 2022. Relive the highlights.

Tesla battery cell supplier Panasonic broke ground on a new lithium-ion battery manufacturing facility in De Soto, Kansas, contributing approximately 30 GWh of annual capacity in North America.

The facility is set to focus on rapidly ramping up the manufacture of 2,170 cylindrical cells to match surging domestic demand within the United States. Panasonic is planning to mass produce the battery cells by March 2025, and upon completion of the facility, it will add 30 GWh of capacity of battery supply to EV companies in the United States.

Quantum computers, which can perform calculations much faster than traditional computers, have a big problem: They are prone to data storage and processing errors caused by disturbances from the environment like vibrations and radiation from warm objects.

But a discovery by scientists led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), on how electrons can be controlled at very low temperatures, suggests a way for addressing this problem and developing more robust and accurate quantum computers.

The team’s findings, which were published online in the Nature Communications journal in October 2022, showed, for the first time, that electrons can have strong interactions between them under certain conditions.

It can be maneuvered quite easily while flying as it has full range of motion in the air.

XPENG AEROHT, the largest flying car company in Asia, released the latest version of the world’s first fully electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) flying car last week in China, according to a press release by the company.

Designed for both flying and driving

Continue reading “The world’s first fully electric vertical take-off and landing flying car is unveiled in China” »

The designed setup can transmit data at a rate of 16 kilobits per second for now.

Basem Shihada, an associate professor of Computer Science at the King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology (KAUST), had been exploring data encoding into an artificial light source when he wondered if the same could be done with sunshine.

“I was simply hoping to use a cell phone camera to record a video of the encoded light stream to try to decode the video to retrieve the data; that’s when I thought, why not do the same with the sunlight?” Shihada said in a statement. “This would be much easier and can be done over the cell phone camera too. So we began to explore sunlight as an information carrier.”

Is solar geoengineering an alternative solution to the climate crisis?

Solar geoengineering is a branch of geoengineering that focuses on reflecting sunlight back into outer space to reduce global warming. There are several solar geoengineering techniques being researched; the most feasible one consists of spraying reflective aerosols in the stratosphere.

Continue reading “Cooling the Earth” »