Lifeboat Foundation

A group of astronomers led by University of California, Davis has obtained new data that suggest the universe is expanding more rapidly than predicted.

The study comes on the heels of a hot debate over just how fast the universe is ballooning; measurements thus far are in disagreement.

The team’s new measurement of the Hubble Constant, or the expansion rate of the universe, involved a different method. They used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in combination with W. M. Keck Observatory’s Adaptive Optics (AO) system to observe three gravitationally-lensed systems. This is the first time ground-based AO technology has been used to obtain the Hubble Constant.

Though evolutionary mergers between cells, some algae have developed the ability to convert a wider spectrum of light energy into sugars.

Drug company says it will seek permission in the US to start marketing the potentially ‘life-changing’ new drug.

Plemper says additional toxicity tests in animals have not thrown up any red flags, and the first trials of EIDD-2801 in humans are likely to start next spring. Pavia says the new drug could eventually be used in combination with other drugs to stave off resistance, a strategy already in use for HIV and hepatitis B treatments.

In a theoretical study, physicists propose that perturbations in the orbit of stars near supermassive black holes could be used to detect wormholes.

A new study outlines a method for detecting a speculative phenomenon that has long captured the imagination of sci-fi fans: wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.

Such pathways could connect one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different universe altogether.

A new study outlines a method for detecting a speculative phenomenon that has long captured the imagination of sci-fi fans: wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.

Such pathways could connect one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different universe altogether.

Whether wormholes exist is up for debate. But in a paper published on Oct. 10 in Physical Review D, physicists describe a technique for detecting these bridges.

Entanglement is one of the properties specific to quantum particles. When two photons become entangled, for instance, the quantum state of the first will correlate perfectly with the quantum state of the second, even if they are at a distance from one another. But what happens when three pairs of entangled photons are placed in a network? Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working in partnership with Tehran’s Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), have proved that this arrangement allows for a new form of quantum correlation in theory. When the scientists forced two photons from separate pairs to become entangled, the connection was also made with their twin photon present elsewhere in the network, forming a highly-correlated triangle. These results, which you can read all about in the journal Physical Review Letters, create the potential for new applications in cryptography while reviving quantum physics at its most fundamental level.

Entanglement involves two quantum particles – photons, for example – forming a single physical system in spite of the distance between them. Every action performed on one of the two photons has an impact on its “twin” photon. This principle of entanglement leads to quantum non-locality: the measurements and statistics of the properties observed on one of the photons are very closely correlated with the measurements made on the other photon. “Quantum non-locality was discovered theoretically by John Stewart Bell in 1964,” begins Nicolas Brunner, associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics in UNIGE’s Faculty of Science. “This showed that photon correlations are exclusively quantum in nature, and so can’t be explained by conventional physics. This principle could be used to generate ultra-secure encryption keys.”

When a guitar string is plucked, it vibrates as any vibrating object would, rising and falling like a wave, as the laws of classical physics predict. But under the laws of quantum mechanics, which describe the way physics works at the atomic scale, vibrations should behave not only as waves, but also as particles. The same guitar string, when observed at a quantum level, should vibrate as individual units of energy known as phonons.

Now scientists at MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have for the first time created and observed a single phonon in a common material at room temperature.

Until now, single phonons have only been observed at ultracold temperatures and in precisely engineered, microscopic materials that researchers must probe in a vacuum. In contrast, the team has created and observed single phonons in a piece of diamond sitting in open air at room temperature. The results, the researchers write in a paper published today in Physical Review X, “bring quantum behavior closer to our daily life.”

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson back in the summer of 2012. Nicknamed “the God particle,” it was the last new undiscovered particle predicted by the backbone theory of particle physics.

Since then, physicists have found a whole lot of, well, nothing. The Higgs high hasn’t carried through the past decade, and no groundbreaking discoveries have appeared since 2012. New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye called this silence “ominous.”

But ahead lies a whole frontier of grand unsolved mysteries, including why there’s more matter than antimatter in the universe, what the true identity of dark matter and dark energy is, or how the strange, ultra-weak neutrino particles ended up so ghostly. For many, it’s an exciting time, with lots of new ideas and upcoming experiments to test them.