Lifeboat Foundation

Strangelets, and specifically nuclearites, their heavy species, are very dense, compact and potentially fast objects made of large and roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks, which may inhabit the universe. Their existence was first hypothesized by Edward Witten back in 1984. These objects have never been detected before and have so far attracted less attention than meteors, perhaps due to their lack of relevance in particle physics.

At the end of 1984, theoretical physicists Alvaro De Rujula and Sheldon Lee Glashow introduced the idea that, when crossing the Earth’s atmosphere, nuclearites produce light in a similar way to meteors, losing very little of their energy in the process. If their prediction is right, teams working at meteor observatories should be able to confirm whether these objects exist or not. So far, however, very few researchers have conducted studies investigating this possibility.

A different cosmic phenomenon rooted in particle physics, known as ultra-high energy cosmic rayssome of the same theorized characteristics of nuclearites. These cosmic rays, in fact, also produce trails of light in the atmosphere, although they do this via a different physical process. In addition, they move much faster than nuclearities and are usually observed in the ultraviolet (UV) band.

To operate safely and reliably in outdoor environments, electronic devices should be resistant to a wide variety of external factors, including radiation. In fact, high-energy radiation can damage several components of field-effect transistors (FETs) commonly used to make electronics, including their superconducting channel, gate oxide and the insulating materials surrounding it (e.g., isolation or substrate oxides).

For several years, research teams worldwide have thus been trying to devise strategies that could make transistors more resistant to radiation. So far, however, this has proved to be highly challenging, and only a few of the techniques proposed in the past have achieved promising results.

Researchers at Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai Tech University have recently fabricated a radiation-hardened and repairable integrated circuit (IC) based on carbon nanotube transistors with ion gel gates. This IC, first presented in a paper pre-published in Nature Electronics, could be used to build new electronic devices that are more resistant to high-energy radiation.

So next week, as U.S. particle physicists start to drum up new ideas for the next decade in a yearlong Snowmass process—named for the Colorado ski resort where such planning exercises once took place—they have no single big project to push for (or against). And in some subfields, the next steps seem far less obvious than they were 10 years ago. “We have to be much more open minded about what particle physics and fundamental physics are,” says Young-Kee Kim of the University of Chicago and chair of the American Physical Society’s division of particles and fields, which is sponsoring the planning exercise.

Giant neutrino experiment is the only sure thing for the field.

EV West, a company that sells electric car components such as motors, controllers, batteries has a Tesla crate motor that fits Chevy LS, small-block mounts.

Live coverage of the countdown and launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida with the U.S. Air Force’s GPS 3 SV04 navigation satellite. Text updates will appear automatically below. Follow us on Twitter.

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The updates don’t come every spring and fall, but space operating systems keep evolving.

Every human being is home to trillions of microbes that are collectively known as the microbiota. Recent research into how these microbes affect the immune system may explain why older people are more vulnerable to disease and suggest ways to tackle that vulnerability.

Scientists at The University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute, led by Professor Neil Mabbott, discovered that as mice get older they showed a marked decrease in the number of M cells found in the lining of the gut. These are specialised cells that look out for infections and trigger the early stages of the immune response. Fewer M cells means a weaker immune system. At the same time, the researchers found that the older mice had depleted microbiota compared to younger mice. The microbiota were less diverse and certain species known to decrease inflammation of the gut in humans were missing.

Turbulent Past

Several companies and teams of scientists have tried to make wave energy a reality in the past, but as Greentech notes, many of their projects fell apart or ran out of money. But with renewed interest — and funding — in the industry, more companies are starting to test out their devices.

“We’re in that valley of death, climbing out of there at the moment,” naval architect Christopher Ridgewell, CEO of AW-Energy, a Finnish company working on a wave energy device called the WaveRoller, told Greentech.

Most of the exoplanets we’ve confirmed to date have never actually been seen directly. We confirm their presence by indirect means, such as the effect they have on their host star. But now, astronomers have revealed images of an indirectly found exoplanet.

It’s not just an impressive feat of skills and technology. The combination of methods has given us a superb toolkit for measuring an exoplanet. For the first time, astronomers have measured both the brightness and the mass of an exoplanet — which has given us a new probe into how planets form.

The exoplanet is Beta Pictoris c (β Pic c), a gas giant orbiting the star — you guessed it — Beta Pictoris, just 63 light-years away. It’s a very young, very bright star, around 23 million years old; as such, it’s still surrounded by a lot of dusty debris, and its exoplanets — we’ve confirmed two to date — are just babies, around 18.5 million years old.