Lifeboat Foundation

Exotic and vibrant colors naturally occur in nature because of pigmentations. But nature is also capable of displaying a whole spectrum of eye-catching colors through building nano-scale surface structures. Creatures with intricate physical aesthetics, like a peacock’s feathers or the rich patterns on a butterfly’s wings, achieve this kind of high color resolution due to the small-scale arrays of distinctly shaped objects on their surfaces. This naturally occurring color structure was exploited by a team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). They developed a laser printing technique that doesn’t require ink.

Laser printing without ink

Continue reading “This Laser Printer Can Produce Vibrant Colors Without Ink” »

Crafting organic containers by shaping the gourd fruit.

Take a sip of coffee from a cup that’s literally GROWN in nature! The gourd fruit can fill any form, making them perfect for crafting containers to hold food and liquids, no plastic needed!

Will this enable people to make super strong concrete the future? 🙂

Scientists in Japan have found a rare mineral in concrete walls of a decommissioned power plant, which is as strong as concrete the Romans used.

Using ocean/sea waves for power. 😃

https://youtu.be/BrDua3j1U3M

This is the Eco Wave Power, an innovative and affordable technology that produces clean, renewable energy from ocean waves. (More info: https://youtu.be/BrDua3j1U3M)

Stem cells from fat. 😃

A new type of stem cell—that is, a cell with regenerative abilities—could be closer on the horizon, a new study led by UNSW Sydney shows.

Continue reading “Scientists are a step closer to developing ‘smart’ stem cells – and they’re made from human fat” »

Not all appears as it would seem in the Whirlpool galaxy. One of the best-studied spiral galaxies and a delight to amateur astronomers, Messier 51, as it’s officially named, is influenced by powerful, invisible forces.

Located 31 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, the galaxy’s arms are strikingly visible as they reach out along the central spine structure, displaying swirling clouds of gas and dust that are massive star-making factories. But new observations by NASA ’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, presented at this week’s 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, shows a more complicated picture.

Radio telescopes previously detected neatly-drawn magnetic fields throughout the length of the galaxy’s massive arms. But under SOFIA’s infrared gaze for the first time those lines give way to a chaotic scene in the outer spiral arms. Using a far-infrared camera and imaging polarimeter instrument called the High-Resolution Airborne Wideband Camera, or HAWC+, researchers found that the magnetic fields in the outskirts of the galaxy no longer follow the spiral structure and are instead distorted.

To understand ourselves and our place in the universe, “we should have humility but also self-respect,” the physicist writes in a new book.

In the spring of 1970, colleges across the country erupted with student protests in response to the Vietnam War and the National Guard’s shooting of student demonstrators at Kent State University. At the University of Chicago, where Frank Wilczek was an undergraduate, regularly scheduled classes were “improvised and semivoluntary” amid the turmoil, as he recalls.

It was during this turbulent time that Wilczek found unexpected comfort, and a new understanding of the world, in mathematics. He had decided to sit in on a class by physics professor Peter Freund, who, with a zeal “bordering on rapture,” led students through mathematical theories of symmetry and ways in which these theories can predict behaviors in the physical world.

The incredible physics behind quantum computing.
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While today’s computers—referred to as classical computers—continue to become more and more powerful, there is a ceiling to their advancement due to the physical limits of the materials used to make them. Quantum computing allows physicists and researchers to exponentially increase computation power, harnessing potential parallel realities to do so.

Quantum computer chips are astoundingly small, about the size of a fingernail. Scientists have to not only build the computer itself but also the ultra-protected environment in which they operate. Total isolation is required to eliminate vibrations and other external influences on synchronized atoms; if the atoms become ‘decoherent’ the quantum computer cannot function.

Continue reading “The incredible physics behind quantum computing | Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, & more | Big Think” »

A spider-like moon rover heading to the lunar surface in 2021 is designed to explore the underground lava tubes in which astronauts might one day live.