Lifeboat Foundation

Large space structures, such as telescopes and spacecraft, should ideally be assembled directly in space, as they are difficult or impossible to launch from Earth as a single piece. In several cases, however, assembling these technologies manually in space is either highly expensive or unfeasible.

In recent years, roboticists have thus been trying to develop systems that could be used to automatically assemble structures in space. To simplify this assembly process, space structures could have a modular design, which essentially means that they are comprised of different building blocks or modules that can be shifted to create different shapes or forms.

Researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Technische Universität München (TUM) have recently developed an autonomous planner that could be used to assemble reconfigurable structures directly in space. This system, introduced in a paper presented at the 2021 IEEE Aerospace Conference, could allow aerospace engineers and astronauts to assemble large structures in space and adapt them for specific use cases, reconfiguring them when necessary.

Nature always finds a way…so they say! But it looks like it may actually be true in the case of our global plastic waste dilemma. Genetic mutations have been discovered in specific natural bacteria that enable them to break the polymer chains of certain plastics. Where have we found these bacteria? Well…in plastic recycling dumps of course. So, gloves and masks on everyone. We’re going in!

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In partnership with EMBL-EBI, we’re incredibly proud to be launching the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.

The University of Surrey has built an artificial intelligence (AI) model that identifies chemical compounds that promote healthy aging—paving the way towards pharmaceutical innovations that extend a person’s lifespan.

Our customers are putting Spot to work in nuclear environments, increasing safety and efficiency at their their electrical production facilities. Learn how thre… See More.

Spot is going to work in nuclear environments, increasing the safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of their electrical production facilities.

There are many reasons for drones to be quick. The professional drone racing circuit aside, speed bodes well when you are searching for survivors on a disaster site, or delivering cargo, or even inspecting critical infrastructure. But how do you get something done in the shortest possible time with limited battery life when you have to navigate through obstacles, changing speeds, and altitude? You use an algorithm.

In the depths of space, there are celestial bodies where extreme conditions prevail: Rapidly rotating neutron stars generate super-strong magnetic fields. And black holes, with their enormous gravitational pull, can cause huge, energetic jets of matter to shoot out into space. An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now proposed a new concept that could allow some of these extreme processes to be studied in the laboratory in the future: A special setup of two high-intensity laser beams could create conditions similar to those found near neutron stars. In the discovered process, an antimatter jet is generated and accelerated very efficiently. The experts present their concept in the journal Communications Physics.

The basis of the new concept is a tiny block of plastic, crisscrossed by micrometer-fine channels. It acts as a target for two lasers. These simultaneously fire ultra-strong pulses at the block, one from the right, the other from the left — the block is literally taken by laser pincers. “When the laser pulses penetrate the sample, each of them accelerates a cloud of extremely fast electrons,” explains HZDR physicist Toma Toncian. “These two electron clouds then race toward each other with full force, interacting with the laser propagating in the opposite direction.” The following collision is so violent that it produces an extremely large number of gamma quanta — light particles with an energy even higher than that of X-rays.

The swarm of gamma quanta is so dense that the light particles inevitably collide with each other. And then something crazy happens: According to Einstein’s famous formula E=mc², light energy can transform into matter. In this case, mainly electron-positron pairs should be created. Positrons are the antiparticles of electrons. What makes this process special is that “very strong magnetic fields accompany it,” describes project leader Alexey Arefiev, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego. “These magnetic fields can focus the positrons into a beam and accelerate them strongly.” In numbers: Over a distance of just 50 micrometers, the particles should reach an energy of one gigaelectronvolt (GeV) — a size that usually requires a full-grown particle accelerator.

Interesting properties of carbon nanotubes prompt a search for diverse inorganic nanotubes. Here, the authors report a supertetrahedral chalcogenide cluster-based semiconducting nanotube array that exhibits high electric conductivity and oriented photoconductive behavior.

One of the most important open questions in science is how our consciousness is established. In the 1990s, long before winning the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for his prediction of black holes, physicist Roger Penrose teamed up with anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose an ambitious answer.

They claimed that the brain’s neuronal system forms an intricate network and that the consciousness this produces should obey the rules of quantum mechanics —the theory that determines how tiny particles like electrons move around. This, they argue, could explain the mysterious complexity of human consciousness.

Continue reading “Can consciousness be explained by quantum physics? Research is closer to finding out” »