Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, scientists from the ALPHA collaboration at CERN reported successfully manipulating antimatter with the use of a laser system — potentially changing antimatter research and guide future experiments on the field.

Antimatter basically refers to the opposite of matter. Specifically, antimatter has sub-atomic particles whose properties (such as electric charge) are the opposite of normal matter. Most of the challenges surrounding the detection and observation of antimatter come from the fact that it immediately “annihilates” when it comes into contact with normal matter.

Continue reading “Researchers Manipulate Antimatter With Laser for the First Time” »

A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.

The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time—few people probably even knew it happened—but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.

While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.

The arguments over NFTs in science are similarly heated, with some saying they provide an incentive to showcase science to the public; a new method of fundraising; and even a way for people to earn royalties when pharmaceutical companies buy access to their genomic data. Others say that NFTs — which operate in a similar way to digital cryptocurrencies — are just needless energy pouring into a market bubble that’s sure to burst.

Is a trend of auctioning non-fungible tokens based on scientific data a fascinating art fad, an environmental disaster or the future of monetized genomics?

A new study takes a look at how the presence of a surface can affect an exoplanets atmosphere, giving astrobiologists a way to study exoplanet surfaces without having to “see” them directly.

We could do it with the James Webb Space Telescope—but we’d also need to return to the unfiltered curiosity we had as teenagers.

How do stellar outbursts affect the planets that orbit them?

Scientists surveyed thousands of stars to understand the impact they have on their orbiting planets’ habitability.

Continue reading “A new understanding of young stars can help us hunt for life in space” »

Scientists used AI to predict birdsong in real time from brain activity. This could go a long way towards establishing a BCI link for human communication. property= description.

Here’s the secret to the self-sustaining tokamak concept.

Could the future of nuclear fusion be a much smaller, self-sustaining tokamak reactor? Researchers at the General Atomics DIII-D National Fusion Facility, the largest nuclear fusion research facility in the U.S., think so. The secret is the pressurized plasma.

The scientists from DIII-D have designed a full “compact nuclear fusion plant” concept and detailed the plans in a new paper in Nuclear Fusion. In simulations, their 8-meter-wide pressurized plasma fusion concept is powerful enough to generate 200 megawatts (MW) of net electricity after the energy cost of the fusion itself.

Continue reading “This Is the First Fusion Power Plant to Generate Net Electricity” »

A new on-chip device that is very good at mediating interactions between light and atoms in a vapour has been developed by researchers in Germany and the UK. Flavie Davidson-Marquis at Humboldt University of Berlin and colleagues call their device a “quantum-optically integrated light cage” and say that it could be used for wide range of applications in quantum information technology.

Hybrid quantum photonics is a rapidly growing area of research that integrates different optical systems within miniaturized devices. One area of interest is the creation of devices for the control, storage and retrieval of the quantum states of light using individual atoms. This is usually done by integrating on-chip photonic devices with miniaturized cells containing warm vapours of alkali atoms. However, this approach faces challenges due to inefficient vapour filling times, high losses of quantum information near cell surfaces and limited overlaps between the wavelengths of light used in optical circuits and the wavelengths of atomic transitions.