Lifeboat Foundation

In the first experiment to take advantage of a new technology for producing powerful attosecond X-ray laser pulses, a research team led by scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University showed they can create electronic ripples in molecules through a process called “impulsive Raman scattering.”

Exploiting this unique interaction will allow scientists to study how electrons zipping around molecules kick off key processes in biology, chemistry, materials science and more. The researchers described their results in Physical Review Letters.

Typically, when X-ray pulses interact with matter the X-rays cause the molecules’ innermost “core” electrons to jump to higher energies. These core-excited states are highly unstable, decaying in just millionths of a billionth of a second. In a majority of X-ray experiments, that’s how the story ends: The excited electrons quickly return to their rightful places by transferring their energy to a neighboring electron, forcing it out of the atom and producing a charged ion.

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Continue reading “Possible signs of alien life discovered on Venus” »

Microsoft’s unusual experiment in the sea off Orkney seems to have provided some valuable lessons.

Three physicists won a $3 million Breakthrough prize for proving there is no fifth force (that we know of). And it all started with a series of table-top experiments using cheap equipment.

Eric Adelberger, Jens Gundlach and Blayne Heckel together lead the “Eöt-Wash Group,” which is devoted to precise tests of physical laws. They take their name from the early-1900s physicist Loránd Eötvös and the University of Washington, where they work. These Eöt-Wash researchers got their start in the mid-1980s, using a device known as a “torsion balance” to disprove claims of an undiscovered fifth force in physics. Since then, they’ve used more elaborate versions of the same device to test the true strength of gravity, detect the tug of dark matter in the Milky Way and search for theoretical physical effects like extra dimensions and “axion wind.”

Real Mars video

1.8 billion pixels! Amazing new Mars panorama from Curiosity.

For 10 years NASA has been capturing images of mars and they now reveal the planet’s amazing beauty.

Continue reading “Omlet Arcade – Mobile Game Livestreaming” »

Astronomers have detected a stinky gas on Venus called phosphine, and weirdly enough, it could be a sign of alien life in the planet’s clouds. It’s still too early to say for sure that Venus hosts life forms, but the discovery opens up a lot of questions about what’s happening on Earth’s neighbor.

A sample-return mission to our planetary neighbor should now be considered.

The blob is neither animal, plant, nor fungus. The remarkable species can find and digest food, form together with others, and pass on knowledge.

Earth-bound telescopes are transforming our understanding of the cosmos. But we think they look pretty out-of-this-world too…