Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2015

Spaceships in movies and TV shows routinely use tractor beams to tow other vessels or keep them in place. Physicists have been hard at work trying take this technology from science fiction to reality. Significant process has recently been made by a team who have developed a laser tractor beam able to attract and repel particles about 100 times further than has been previously achieved. The lead author of the paper, published in Nature Photonics, is Vladlen Shvedov at Australian National University in Canberra.

Other recent tractor beams have used acoustics or water, but this one uses a single laser beam to control tiny particles about 0.2 millimeters in diameter. The tractor beam was able to manipulate the particles from a distance of 20 centimeters, shattering previous records. Despite this incredible distance, the researchers claim it is still on the short end of what is possible for this tractor beam technique.

Continue reading “Physicists Develop Reversible Laser Tractor Beam Functional Over Long Distances” »

The hype about artificial intelligence is unavoidable. From Beijing to Seattle, companies are investing vast sums into these data-hungry systems in the belief that they will profoundly transform the business landscape. The stories in this special report will deepen your understanding of a technology that may reshape our world.

© 2019 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy (Your California Privacy Rights).

Fortune may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.

Continue reading “Artificial Intelligence” »

Tech Watch 2020:

Thought leaders predict the tech developments that could have a big impact in the coming year.

KYIV — Some 13,000 people have been killed, a quarter of them civilians, and as many as 30,000 wounded in the war in eastern Ukraine since it broke out in April 2014, the United Nations says.

The estimated toll includes more than 3,300 civilian deaths, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a document dated February 25 and provided to RFE/RL the same day.

It comes as the simmering conflict between Russia-backed separatists and government forces approaches its sixth year, with little progress toward the implementation of a Western-brokered cease-fire and political-settlement deal known as the Minsk Accords.

There is a hidden famine in north korea and mass atrocities are happening there.

Korean: 조선기근), also known as the Arduous March or the March of Suffering^[5] ( 고난의 행군 ), was a period of mass starvation together with a general economic crisis from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea.^[6].

56 million people died in 2017.¹ What caused their death? How did the causes of death change over time and differ between different countries and world regions? And what are the risk factors that lead to early death? These are the big questions we are answering here.

Welp o.o if we got a global emp we could disable all nukes.

This nuclear war simulator predicts what would happen in the first few hours of a major conflict between Russia and the U.S.

Circa 2017

One of the options that the United States is looking at to counter North Korea’s nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles is an experimental weapon called CHAMP.

The research, which appears this week in Science, examined the electronic and magnetic behavior of a “strange metal” compound of ytterbium, rhodium and silicon as it both neared and passed through a critical transition at the boundary between two well-studied quantum phases.

The study at Rice University and Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) provides the strongest direct evidence to date of entanglement’s role in bringing about quantum criticality, said study co-author Qimiao Si of Rice.

“When we think about quantum entanglement, we think about small things,” Si said. “We don’t associate it with macroscopic objects. But at a quantum critical point, things are so collective that we have this chance to see the effects of entanglement, even in a metallic film that contains billions of billions of quantum mechanical objects.”