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At first glance, a pack of wolves has little to do with a vinaigrette. However, a team led by Ramin Golestanian, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, has developed a model that establishes a link between the movement of predators and prey and the segregation of vinegar and oil. They expanded a theoretical framework that until now was only valid for inanimate matter. In addition to predators and prey, other living systems such as enzymes or self-organizing cells can now be described.

Order is not always apparent at first glance. If you ran with a pack of wolves hunting deer, the movements would appear disordered. However, if the hunt is observed from a bird’s eye view and over a longer period of time, patterns become apparent in the movement of the animals. In physics, such behavior is considered orderly. But how does this order emerge? The Department of Living Matter Physics of Ramin Golestanian is dedicated to this question and investigates the physical rules that govern motion in living or active systems. Golestanian’s aim is to reveal universal characteristics of active, living matter. This includes not only larger organisms such as predators and prey but also bacteria, enzymes and motor proteins as well as artificial systems such as micro-robots. When we describe a group of such active systems over great distances and long periods of time, the specific details of the systems lose importance.

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Ever since Nikola Tesla spewed electricity in all directions with his coil back in 1891, scientists have been thinking up ways to send electrical power through the air. The dream is to charge your phone or laptop, or maybe even a healthcare device such as a pacemaker, without the need for wires and plugs. The tricky bit is getting the electricity to find its intended target, and getting that target to absorb the electricity instead of just reflect it back into the air—all preferably without endangering anyone along the way.

These days, you can wirelessly charge a smartphone by putting it within an inch of a charging station. But usable long-range wireless power transfer, from one side of a room to another or even across a building, is still a work in progress. Most of the methods currently in development involve focusing narrow beams of energy and aiming them at their intended target. These methods have had some success, but are so far not very efficient. And having focused electromagnetic beams flying around through the air is unsettling.

Now, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD), in collaboration with a colleague at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, have developed an improved technique for wireless power transfer technology that may promise long-range power transmission without narrowly focused and directed energy beams. Their results, which widen the applicability of previous techniques, were published Nov. 17, 2020 in the journal Nature Communications.

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Calculations show how theoretical ‘axionic strings’ could create odd behavior if produced in exotic materials in the lab.

A hypothetical particle that could solve one of the biggest puzzles in cosmology just got a little less mysterious. A RIKEN physicist and two colleagues have revealed the mathematical underpinnings that could explain how so-called axions might generate string-like entities that create a strange voltage in lab materials.

Axions were first proposed in the 1970s by physicists studying the theory of quantum chromodynamics, which describes how some elementary particles are held together within the atomic nucleus. The trouble was that this theory predicted some bizarre properties for known particles that are not observed. To fix this, physicists posited a new particle—later dubbed the axion, after a brand of laundry detergent, because it helped clean up a mess in the theory.

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From time to time, Fully Charged receives an offer that is too good to refuse, and when a long-term friend of the show offered us his electrified Ferrari 308, we didn’t hesitate.

This is part of an ongoing collaboration between Fully Charged and Electrek.

While the sheer scale of combustion engine cars that are converted to electric remains to be seen, conceivably, conversions could become an entirely new market. A number of companies are making inroads in this most intriguing of markets, including New Electric in Ireland and the Netherlands working on open source conversions, and Transition One in France that convert an array of smaller combustion engine cars. In North America, cool conversion shops like EV West in California, and Moment Motors in Texas, are popping up, and in England, Electric Classic Cars, who worked on the Ferrari in question, have featured a few times on Fully Charged.

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The last decade has been marked by a series of remarkable discoveries identifying how the universe is composed. It is understood that the mysterious substance dark matter makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. Observable matter in the universe consists of ionized particles. Thus, a profound understanding of ionized matter and its interaction with light, could lead to a deeper understanding of the relationships at play that formed the universe. While ionized matter, or plasma, is relatively easy to generate in the lab, studying it is extremely challenging as methods that can capture ionization states and density are virtually non-existant.

In a new paper published in Light Science & Application, a team of scientists has succeeded in directly observing the formation and interaction of highly ionized krypton plasma using femtosecond coherent ultraviolet light and a novel four-dimensional model.

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I guess they can now make the diamond sword from minecraft! 😃

While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature.

Although the idea of creating diamonds in a laboratory in just a few minutes would be an appealing one for jewelers, rappers or those looking to pop a certain question, that’s not quite the aim of this type of research.

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Is this a case where money falls from the heavens!

This may start a craze where people chase after meteors! 😃

A rock from outer space landing on your property and resulting in millions in your bank account sounds more unlikely that a lottery win, but one lucky man has found himself in the fortunate position.

Continue reading “Man Becomes Instant Millionaire When A Meteorite Hits His Home” | >