Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at CERN have discovered an exotic new particle that’s quite charming. Known as T_cc⁺, the particle belongs to a rare class called tetraquarks, and its unusual composition makes it the longest-lived exotic hadron found so far.

Matter is made up of fundamental particles called quarks, which come in six “flavors”: up, down, strange, charm, top and bottom. These quarks group together in different ways to make up different types of matter – baryons like protons and neutrons are made up of several quarks, while mesons are formed from quarks paired with antiquarks, their antimatter equivalents.

Baryons are usually comprised of two or three quarks, but exotic baryons made up of four or five have been discovered in recent years, after being theorized for decades. T_cc⁺ is one of these unusual particles with four quarks, known as a tetraquark.

Few people seem to realise how devastating this is, not only for human wellbeing – we need insects to pollinate our crops, recycle dung, leaves and corpses, keep the soil healthy, control pests, and much more – but for larger animals, such as birds, fish and frogs, which rely on insects for food. Wildflowers rely on them for pollination. As insects become more scarce, our world will slowly grind to a halt, for it cannot function without them.

A strong argument can be made that humans ought to farm more insects as an alternative to pigs, cows or chickens. Farming insects is more energy efficient and requires less space and water. They are a healthier source of protein, being high in essential amino acids and lower in saturated fats than beef, and we are much less likely to catch a disease from eating insects (think bird flu or Covid-19). So if we wish to feed the 10–12 billion people who are projected to be living on our planet by 2050, then we should be taking the farming of insects seriously as a healthier source of protein and a more sustainable option to conventional livestock.

While western societies may not eat insects, we do regularly consume them at one step removed in the food chain. Freshwater fish such as trout and salmon feed heavily on insects, as do game birds like partridge, pheasant and turkey.

Continue reading “The insect apocalypse: ‘Our world will grind to a halt without them’” »

The future of energy storage is getting better. Welcome salt batteries! cheaper & more abundant than lithium!

It is claimed to have an energy density of up to 160 Wh/kg, which is a far cry from the density offered by lithium batteries of up to 285 Wh/kg, but is nothing to sneeze at in the world of sodium batteries. It can also be charged to 80 percent capacity in 15 minutes at room temperature, and maintain 90 percent of its capacity in temperatures of-20 °C (−4 °F).

A cheap and abundant material like salt might have plenty to offer the world of science, and one field where it could have game-changing effects is battery chemistry. Leveraging salt could help us avoid much of the cost and difficulty in sourcing scarcer lithium, and Chinese giant CATL is looking to lead the charge by launching its first commercial sodium-ion battery.

Continue reading “Chinese giant CATL launches a commercial salt-based battery for EVs” »

A nanoparticle diagnostic tool developed by MIT can detect cancer in urine. It could also be used in scans to detect the disease anywhere in the body.

If confirmed, the finding would push back our earliest evidence of animal life by about 350 million years.

Virtual game worlds provide a non-stop stream of open-ended challenges that nudge AI towards general intelligence.

Marco Alverà made his remarks during an interview with “Squawk Box Europe”.

Prior to 1970, bulletproof vests were pretty iffy, with a history extending as far as the 1500s when there were attempts to make metal armor that was bulletproof. By the 20th century there was ballistic nylon, but it took kevlar to produce garments with real protection against projectile impact. Now a 3D printed nanomaterial might replace kevlar.

A group of scientists have published a paper that interconnected tetrakaidecahedrons made up of carbon struts that are arranged via two-photon lithography.

We know that tetrakaidecahedrons sound like a modern invention, but, in fact, they were proposed by Lord Kelvin in the 19th century as a shape that would allow things to be packed together with minimum surface area. Sometimes known as a Kelvin cell, the shape is used to model foam, among other things.

Daniel Korsun’s undergraduate career at MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.