Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 39

A team of scientists from the SETI Institute and the University of California at Davis has documented, for the first time, humpback whales producing large bubble rings, like a human smoker blowing smoke rings, during friendly interactions with humans. This previously little-studied behavior may represent play or communication.

The paper is published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.

Humpback whales are already known for using to corral prey and creating bubble trails and bursts when competing to escort a female whale. These new observations show humpback whales producing bubble rings during friendly encounters with humans. This finding contributes to the WhaleSETI team’s broader goal of studying non-human intelligence to aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

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In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, built with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.

“Our goal was to construct this deep field of space on a physical scale that far exceeded anything that had been done before,” said UC Santa Barbara physics professor Caitlin Casey, who co-leads the COSMOS-Web collaboration alongside Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“If you had a printout of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field on a standard piece of paper,” she said, referring to the iconic view of nearly 10,000 released by NASA in 2004, “our image would be slightly larger than a 13-foot by 13-foot-wide mural, at the same depth. So it’s really strikingly large.”

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Multiferroics are materials that exhibit more than one ferroic property, typically ferroelectricity (i.e., a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reversed by electric fields) and ferromagnetism (i.e., the spontaneous magnetic ordering of electron spins). These materials have proved promising for the development of various new technologies, including spintronics, devices that exploit the spin of electrons to process and store information.

So far, physicists and material scientists have uncovered two distinct types of multiferroics, dubbed Type-I and Type-II multiferroics. In Type-I multiferroics, ferroelectricity and arise independently from distinct physical mechanisms, while in Type-II multiferroics, ferroelectricity is driven by magnetic ordering.

Researchers at Nanjing University of Science and Technology recently predicted the existence of a third type of multiferroics, referred to as Type-III multiferroics, in which magnetism is driven by ferroelectricity. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, could inspire future efforts aimed at identifying materials with the characteristics they described, which could be highly advantageous for the advancement of spintronics as well as other memory and information processing systems.

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Researchers at the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science introduce a novel approach to reducing electronic waste and advancing sustainable data processing: turning old smartphones into tiny data centers.

Each year, more than 1.2 billion smartphones are produced globally. The production of electronic devices is not only energy-intensive but also consumes valuable natural resources. Additionally, the manufacturing and delivery processes release a significant amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, devices are aging faster than ever—users replace their still-functional phones on average every 2 to 3 years. At best, old devices are recycled; at worst, they end up in landfills.

Although the most sustainable solution would be to change and consider more carefully whether every new model truly requires replacing the old one, this is easier said than done. Rapid technological development quickly renders older devices obsolete. Therefore, alternative solutions are needed—such as extending the lifespan of devices by giving them an entirely new purpose.

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Quantum materials exhibit remarkable emergent properties when they are excited by external sources. However, these excited states decay rapidly once the excitation is removed, limiting their practical applications.

A team of researchers from Harvard University and the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have now demonstrated an approach to stabilize these fleeting states and probe their using bright X-ray flashes from the X-ray free electron laser SwissFEL at PSI. The findings are published in the journal Nature Materials.

Some materials exhibit fascinating quantum properties that can lead to transformative technologies, from lossless electronics to high-capacity batteries. However, when these materials are in their natural state, these properties remain hidden, and scientists need to gently ask for them to pop up.

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Researchers have published the demonstration of a fully-integrated single-chip microwave photonics system, combining optical and microwave signal processing on a single silicon chip.

The chip integrates high-speed modulators, optical filters, photodetectors, as well as transfer-printed lasers, making it a compact, self-contained and programmable solution for high-frequency .

This breakthrough can replace bulky and power-hungry components, enabling faster wireless networks, low-cost microwave sensing, and scalable deployment in applications like 5G/6G, , and .

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MIT physicists have demonstrated a new form of magnetism that could one day be harnessed to build faster, denser, and less power-hungry “spintronic” memory chips.

The new magnetic state is a mash-up of two main forms of magnetism: the ferromagnetism of everyday fridge magnets and compass needles, and antiferromagnetism, in which materials have magnetic properties at the microscale yet are not macroscopically magnetized.

Now, the MIT team has demonstrated a new form of magnetism, termed “p-wave magnetism.”

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In a study by TU Wien and FU Berlin, researchers have measured what happens when quantum physical information is lost. This clarifies important connections between thermodynamics, information theory and quantum physics.

Heat and information—these are two very different concepts that, at first glance, appear to have nothing to do with each other. Heat and energy are central concepts in thermodynamics, an important field of physics and even one of its cornerstones. Information theory, on the other hand, is an abstract topic in mathematics.

But as early as the 1960s, physicist Rolf Landauer was able to show that the two are closely related: the deletion of information is inevitably linked to the exchange of energy. You cannot delete a data storage device without releasing heat to the outside world.

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Transistors are fundamental to microchips and modern electronics. Invented by Bardeen and Brattain in 1947, their development is one of the 20th century’s key scientific milestones. Transistors work by controlling electric current using an electric field, which requires semiconductors. Unlike metals, semiconductors have fewer free electrons and an energy band gap that makes it harder to excite electrons.

Doping introduces , enabling current flow under an electric field. This allows for nonlinear current-voltage behavior, making signal amplification or switching possible, as in p–n junctions. Metals, by contrast, have too many that quickly redistribute to cancel external fields, preventing controlled current flow—hence, they can’t be used as traditional transistors.

However, recent advances show promise in ultrathin superconducting metals as potential transistor materials. When cooled below a , these materials carry current with zero resistance. This behavior arises from the formation of Cooper pairs—electrons bound by lattice vibrations—that condense into a coherent quantum state, immune to scattering and energy loss.

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A new electrode enables scalable hydrogen production from seawater, offering a clean, desalination-free solution for arid coastal regions. Researchers at the University of Sharjah have developed a new technology that can produce clean hydrogen fuel directly from seawater, and at an industrial sca

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