Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 4

Norte and his colleagues initially considered patterning the light sails with an array of identical circular holes, but such a pattern would reduce the overall effect of the powering laser. As the sail speeds up and moves away from the laser, the wavelength it preferentially reflects will shift because of the Doppler effect, and the sail will subsequently receive less of a push. What is needed instead is a pattern that can handle Doppler-shift changes while remaining highly reflective.

To find the optimal pattern, the researchers turned to a neural network, which predicted an optimal shape that is oblong rather than circular. “It looks like a potato,” says Miguel Bessa of Brown University, Rhode Island, who led the theory side of the project. Specifically, the team arranged several potato shapes in a repeating five-neighbor pattern, or pentagonal lattice. The potato-shaped arrangement allows the system to respond to a broader range of wavelengths without having to make it thicker and thus heavier.

The researchers are now working on increasing the size of their sail and looking into ways to test how well it flies. Norte notes that the light sail is just a means to accelerate the nanospacecraft, which will include a microchip, cameras, and other instruments. All those parts need to be miniaturized so that they weigh less than one gram total. “We are really trying to use nanotechnology to go faster and further than we have been able to with traditional spacecraft,” Norte says.

Read more | >

Top quarks and antiquarks have been detected in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, showing that all six quark flavors were present in the Universe’s first moments.

Quarks, the fundamental building blocks of matter, are usually confined within hadrons, such as protons and neutrons, by the strong force. But in the first moments after the big bang, quarks and gluons moved freely in an extremely hot, dense state of matter called a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) [1]. This “primordial soup” was the Universe’s first form of matter, existing for roughly 10 microseconds after the big bang, until the Universe cooled sufficiently for quarks and gluons to combine [2]. Scientists recreate and study these early-Universe conditions by smashing together ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, and similar facilities.

Read more | >

Beijing Normal University-led researchers have identified specific high-order thalamic nuclei that drive human conscious perception by activating the prefrontal cortex. Their findings enhance understanding of how the brain forms conscious experience, offering new empirical support for theories that assign a central role to thalamic structures rather than cortical areas alone.

Consciousness has been described as existing in two distinct forms: the general state of being awake or asleep, and the specific contents of subjective awareness. Most studies investigating the neural basis of have focused on the cerebral cortex.

Subcortical structures, including high-order thalamic nuclei, remain comparatively unexplored, ill-accounting for how rapidly shifting becomes part of .

Read more | >

A team of researchers led by Professor Keisuke Takahashi at the Faculty of Science, Hokkaido University, have created FLUID (Flowing Liquid Utilizing Interactive Device), an open-source robotic system constructed using a 3D printer and off-the-shelf electronic components.

To demonstrate FLUID’s capabilities, the team used the robot to automate the co-precipitation of cobalt and nickel, creating binary materials with precision and efficiency.

“By adopting open source, utilizing a 3D printer, and taking advantage of commonly-available electronics, it became possible to construct a functional robot that is customized to a particular set of needs at a fraction of the costs typically associated with commercially-available robots,” said Mikael Kuwahara, the lead author of the study.

Read more | >

The concept of constructing a self-supporting structure made of rods—without the use of nails, ropes, or glue—dates back to Leonardo da Vinci. In the Codex Atlanticus, da Vinci illustrated a design for a self-supporting bridge across a river, which can be easily demonstrated using toothpicks, matches, or chopsticks. However, this design is fragile—pulling one of the rods or pushing the bridge from below can cause it to collapse.

In contrast, —which are also self-supporting structures consisting of rigid sticks and twigs—are remarkably stable despite continuous disturbances such as wind, ground vibrations, and the landing or takeoff of birds. What makes bird nests so sturdy?

This was the question at the center of a recent paper from L. Mahadevan and his team at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more | >

Researchers have successfully demonstrated the UK’s first long-distance ultra-secure transfer of data over a quantum communications network, including the UK’s first long-distance quantum-secured video call.

The team, from the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, created the network, which uses standard fiber-optic infrastructure, but relies on a variety of quantum phenomena to enable ultra-secure data transfer.

The network uses two types of quantum key distribution (QKD) schemes: “unhackable” encryption keys hidden inside particles of light; and distributed entanglement: a phenomenon that causes quantum particles to be intrinsically linked.

Read more | >

A step forward in the development of diamond CMOS integrated circuits. A research team at NIMS has developed the world’s first n-channel diamond MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor). This breakthrough marks a significant step toward realizing CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-se

Read more | >

A new theory links gravity to quantum entropy and introduces the G-field, possibly explaining dark matter and cosmic expansion. In a recent study published in Physical Review D, Professor Ginestra Bianconi, a Professor of Applied Mathematics at Queen Mary University of London, presents a groundbr

Read more | >

Geologists have made certain assumptions about how the crust making up our planet’s earliest surface formed, but a new study has found that Earth’s very first protocrust was surprisingly similar to the shell of solid rock in place today.

It may mean a complete rethink of how Earth’s coat transitioned from a skin of boiling magma to the shifting armor of tectonic plates we now live on, according to the international team of researchers behind the study.

“Scientists have long thought that tectonic plates needed to dive beneath each other to create the chemical fingerprint we see in continents,” says geochemist Simon Turner, from Macquarie University in Australia.

Read more | >