Lifeboat Foundation

The creature is a kind of choanoflagellate, a microorganism closely related to animals:

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered an unusual creature in Eastern Sierra Nevada’s Mono Lake. This organism could provide insights into the complex animal life that originated on Earth over 650 million years ago.

Continue reading “Creature found in lake of cyanide can unlock animal origin secrets” »

Seeing the universe as one quantum object changes how we think about reality. It suggests that the separations we see are just an illusion—a useful one for everyday life, but an illusion nonetheless. At the deepest level, there’s no true division, no separate objects or events. Everything is part of one continuous, interconnected whole.

University of Arizona researchers have developed an ‘attomicroscopy’ technique using a novel ultrafast electron microscope that captures moving electrons in unprecedented detail, paving the way for significant scientific breakthroughs in physics and other fields.

Imagine having a camera so advanced that it can capture freeze-frame images of a moving electron—an object so fast it could orbit the Earth multiple times in just a second. Researchers at the University of Arizona have developed the world’s fastest electron microscope capable of this remarkable feat.

They believe their work will lead to groundbreaking advancements in physics, chemistry, bioengineering, materials sciences, and more.

To introduce quantum networks into the marketplace, engineers must overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery. Now, scientists at Qunnect Inc. in Brooklyn, New York, have taken a large step forward by operating just such a network under the streets of New York City.

My new article, “Quantum Entanglement of Optical Photons: The First Experiment, 1964–67,” is intended to convey the spirit of a small research project that reaches into uncharted territory. The article breaks with tradition, as it offers a first-person account of the strategy and challenges of the experiment, as well as an interpretation of the final result and its significance. In this guest editorial, I will introduce the subject and also attempt to illuminate the question “What is a paradox?”

The fabric of spacetime is roiling with vibrating quantum fields, known as vacuum energy. It’s right there, everywhere we look. But could we ever get anything out of it?

Recently, quantum spin liquid signatures have been found in 3D systems. Here, using a combination of inelastic neutron scattering and calculations, the authors study the dynamic magnetic properties of a 3D quantum spin liquid candidate K2Ni2(SO4)3, identifying a spin liquid region in the theoretical phase diagram.

Figure 5 is the second key result of our work. It demonstrates a robust route to decomposing the contributions to the overall chiral optical signal, originating from interfering pathways encoding different topological charge. The decomposition relies on straightforward Fourier analysis of the far-field image. Given the ability to precisely control the orientation of the polarization ellipse of the incident infrared light, chiral topological light generated by such infrared drivers stands out as a robust probe of molecular chirality, capable of inducing strongly enantiosensitive total intensity signals as well as giant rotations of intense spectral features.

The concept of chiral topological light introduced here is not limited to vortex beams: other members of the larger family of structured light beams^32,33,34 can be used to create locally and globally chiral topological light. We envision using tightly focused radially polarized beams, which are known to posses strong longitudinal components³⁵, central to the concept of local chirality. Skyrmionic beams^36,37 could also be used, for example to induce topological distributions with radially dependent topological charges. From the perspective of structured light^32,33,34,38 the temporally chiral vortex introduced here represents a new kind of polarization singularity, which could be analysed by extending the current framework from monochromatic 3D fields^39,40 to polychromatic 3D fields^13,41,42.

Our method is not limited to high harmonics. Its extension to low-order parametric processes such as chiral sum-frequency generation⁴³ has potential for non-destructive enantiosensitive imaging in the ultraviolet region and for exploiting intrinsically low-order nonlinearities for enantiosensitive detection in the X-ray domain^16,17.

The detection of individual particles and molecules has opened new horizons in analytical chemistry, cellular imaging, nanomaterials, and biomedical diagnostics. Traditional single-molecule detection methods rely heavily on fluorescence techniques, which require labeling of the target molecules.