Lifeboat Foundation

A hint of the possible existence of a hypothetical particle called a leptoquark has appeared as an unexpected difference in how beauty quarks decay to create electrons or muons. Measured by physicists working on the LHCb experiment on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the difference appears to violate the principle of “lepton universality”, which is part of the Standard Model of particle physics. The measurement has been made at a statistical significance of 3.1σ, which is well below the 5σ level that is usually considered a discovery. If the violation is confirmed, it could provide physicists with important clues about physics beyond the Standard Model – such as the existence of leptoquarks.

When high-energy protons are smashed together at the LHC large numbers of exotic particles are created, including some containing the beauty quark. These exotic particles quickly decay, and beauty quarks can follow decay paths that involve the production of either electrons or muons, which are both leptons. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the interactions involved in producing leptons do not discriminate between lepton type, so the rates at which electrons and muons are created by beauty-quark decays are expected to be the same.

Starting in 2014, physicists working on LHCb noticed hints of the violation of this lepton universality. Now, after analysing collision data collected between 2011 and 2018, the researchers have found that the beauty quark appears to favour the electron decay chain over the muon decay chain.

NASA has announced its newest fleet of far-out exploration ideas, including projects tackling sample return from Saturn’s moon Titan, artificial gravity for astronauts, and collecting vast amounts of planetary data.

The two companies, along with Westinghouse Government Services, were each given preliminary contracts of less than $15 million in March 2020 to begin design work. The final design is due to the Strategic Capabilities Office in 2022, at which point the Defense Department will make a decision on whether to move forward with testing the systems.

“We are thrilled with the progress our industrial partners have made on their designs,” Jeff Waksman, Project Pele’s program manager, said in a statement. “We are confident that by early 2022 we will have two engineering designs matured to a sufficient state that we will be able to determine suitability for possible construction and testing.”

The Pentagon has long eyed nuclear power as a potential way to reduce both its energy cost and its vulnerability in its dependence on local energy grids. According to a news release, the Defense Department uses “approximately 30 Terawatt-hours of electricity per year and more than 10 million gallons of fuel per day.”

A new type of rock created during large and exceptionally hot volcanic eruptions has been discovered beneath the Pacific Ocean.

An international team of researchers including the University of Leeds unearthed the previously unknown form of basalt after drilling through the Pacific ocean floor.

The discovery suggests that ocean floor eruptions sourced in the Earth’s mantle were even hotter and more voluminous than previously thought. Report co-author is Dr Ivan Savov, of Leeds’ Institute of Geophysics and Tectonics, in the university’s School of Earth and Environment.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the first Space Shuttle launch, Lego is releasing a new Space Shuttle Discovery set in collaboration with NASA. Discovery was not the first shuttle to take flight — that would be Columbia, which likely stirs up too many sad feelings for a Lego set — but it was the shuttle that launched the Hubble Space Telescope, which is also included in the set.

Available April 1st for $200, the set has 2354 pieces, including three newly designed pieces for the windscreen and payload bay. It also includes 108 drum lacquered silver pieces, the most of any Lego set yet.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, have developed a novel type of thermometer that can simply and quickly measure temperatures during quantum calculations with extremely high accuracy. The breakthrough provides a benchmarking tool for quantum computing of great value—and opens up for experiments in the exciting field of quantum thermodynamics.

Key components in quantum computers are coaxial cables and waveguides—structures that guide waveforms and act as the vital connection between the quantum processor and the classical electronics that control it. Microwave pulses travel along the waveguides to the quantum processor, and are cooled down to extremely low temperatures along the way. The waveguide also attenuates and filters the pulses, enabling the extremely sensitive quantum computer to work with stable quantum states.

In order to maximize control over this mechanism, the researchers need to be sure that these waveguides are not carrying noise due to thermal motion of electrons on top of the pulses that they send. In other words, they have to measure the temperature of the electromagnetic fields at the cold end of the microwave waveguides, the point where the controlling pulses are delivered to the computer’s qubits. Working at the lowest possible temperature minimizes the risk of introducing errors in the qubits.

# **MARS: A GATEWAY TO THE SOLAR SYSTEM**

Today’s highlight: **Bruce MacKenzie**, founder of the Mars Foundation.

Continue reading “2021 SpaceRenaissance Webinar Series: Webinar on the Development of Mars, the Asteroids, and Beyond” »

Humans have the innate ability to store important information in their mind for short periods of time, a capability known as short-term memory. Over the past few decades, numerous neuroscientists have tried to understand how neural circuits store short-term memories, as this could lead to approaches to assist individuals whose memory is failing and help to devise memory enhancing interventions.

Researchers at Stanford and the Janelia Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute have recently identified neural circuit motifs involved in how humans store short-term memories. Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggest that memory-related neural circuits contain recurrently connected modules that independently maintain selective and continuous activity.

“Short-term memories are of approximately 10 seconds or so, for example, if you needed to remember a phone number while you looked for a pen to write the number,” Kayvon Daie, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “Individual neurons, however, are very forgetful, as they can only remember their inputs for about 10 milliseconds. It has been hypothesized that if two forgetful neurons were connected to each other, they could continuously remind each other of what they were supposed to remember so that the circuit can now hold information for many seconds.”

Researchers from the Graduate School of Engineering and Symbiotic Intelligent Systems Research Center at Osaka University used motion capture cameras to compare the expressions of android and human faces. They found that the mechanical facial movements of the robots, especially in the upper regions, did not fully reproduce the curved flow lines seen in the faces of actual people. This research may lead to more lifelike and expressive artificial faces.

The field of robotics has advanced a great deal in recent decades. However, while current androids can appear very humanlike at first, their active facial expressions are still unnatural and unsettling to people. The exact reasons for this effect have been difficult to pinpoint. Now, a research team at Osaka University has used motion capture technology to monitor the facial expressions of five android faces and compared the results with actual human facial expressions. This was accomplished with six infrared cameras that monitored reflection markers at 120 frames per second and allowed the motions to be represented as three-dimensional displacement vectors.

“Advanced artificial systems can be difficult to design because the numerous components have complex interactions with each other. The appearance of an android face can experience surface deformations that are hard to control,” study first author Hisashi Ishihara says. These deformations can be due to interactions between components such as the soft skin sheet and the skull-shaped structure, as well as the mechanical actuators.