Lifeboat Foundation

A few minutes into the life of the universe, colliding emissions of light energy created the first particles of matter and antimatter. We are familiar with the reverse process—matter generating energy—in everything from a campfire to an atomic bomb, but it has been difficult to recreate that critical transformation of light into matter.

Now, a new set of simulations by a research team led by UC San Diego’s Alexey Arefiev point the way toward making matter from light. The process starts by aiming a high-power laser at a target to generate a magnetic field as strong as that of a neutron star. This field generates gamma ray emissions that collide to produce—for the very briefest instant—pairs of matter and antimatter particles.

The study, published May 11 in Physical Review Applied offers a sort of recipe that experimentalists at the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) high-power laser facilities in Eastern Europe could follow to produce real results in one to two years, said Arefiev, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

An electric-powered Cessna 208B Grand Caravan lifted off a Moses Lake runway on 28 May, marking another milestone in a project that aims to bring all-electric flight to consumer air travel.

In taking flight, the Caravan became, according to the companies behind the project, the largest all-electric passenger or cargo aircraft ever to fly.

Continue reading “All-electric Grand Caravan makes maiden flight” »

By harvesting the everyday energy of static electricity, scientists may have found the world’s most plentiful source of renewable, sustainable power.

Prof. Dong Sung Kim and his joint research team presented a new technology that can increase the amount of power generated by a triboelectric nanogenerator. The research team developed a high-efficiency integrated circuit to obtain reliable and practical electrical energy from the triboelectric nanogenerator.

This spring will bring to North America a batch of 17-year cicadas known as Brood IX. Scientists are asking for help tracking them amid the global pandemic.

Researchers have designed a new way to make concrete that would make frustrating cracks a thing of the past.

A CNN crew was arrested while giving a live television report Friday morning in Minneapolis — and then released about an hour later — as the crew covered ongoing protests over the death in police custody of George Floyd.

State police detained CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez, his producer and his photojournalist shortly after 5 a.m. CT (6 a.m. ET) as Jimenez was reporting live from a street south of downtown, near where a police precinct building was earlier set ablaze.

Whereas textbooks depict metabolism in perfect homeostasis, disturbances occur in real life. One particularly relevant disturbance, caused by excess food and alcohol consumption and exacerbated by genetics, is reductive stress. New work by Goodman et al. identifies a biomarker of reductive stress and uses a gene therapy solution in mice. This work suggests how exercise and an accessible nutritional technology can synergistically increase catabolism and relieve reductive stress.

In the local (redshift z ≈ 0) Universe, collisional ring galaxies make up only ~0.01% of galaxies¹ and are formed by head-on galactic collisions that trigger radially propagating density waves^2,3,4. These striking systems provide key snapshots for dissecting galactic disks and are studied extensively in the local Universe^5,6,7,8,9. However, not much is known about distant (z 0.1) collisional rings^{10,11,12,13,14}. Here we present a detailed study of a ring galaxy at a look-back time of 10.8 Gyr (z = 2.19). Compared with our Milky Way, this galaxy has a similar stellar mass, but has a stellar half-light radius that is 1.5–2.2 times larger and is forming stars 50 times faster. The extended, diffuse stellar light outside the star-forming ring, combined with a radial velocity on the ring and an intruder galaxy nearby, provides evidence for this galaxy hosting a collisional ring. If the ring is secularly evolved^15,16, the implied large bar in a giant disk would be inconsistent with the current understanding of the earliest formation of barred spirals^{17,18,19,20,21}. Contrary to previous predictions^10,11,12, this work suggests that massive collisional rings were as rare 11 Gyr ago as they are today. Our discovery offers a unique pathway for studying density waves in young galaxies, as well as constraining the cosmic evolution of spiral disks and galaxy groups.