Lifeboat Foundation

Fusion energy has long been hailed as the holy grail because of its potential for limitless amounts of clean energy. But that promise has trailed reality for decades, with billions of dollars in research leading to few breakthroughs. Now there’s optimism that is about to change, partly because of new startups funded by the likes of Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.

Yahoo Finance went inside the country’s largest magnetic fusion facility for an exclusive look, to explore the challenges of bringing this technology to commercial use for the latest episode of NEXT.

“The race is on to actually see who can develop this and who can get it to the masses the fastest,” said David Callaway, former editor-in-chief of USA Today and founder of Callaway Climate Insights, a news and information service focused on the business of climate change.

Talk about the call coming from inside the house!

In an interview with The Financial Times, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassibis likened the frothiness shrouding the AI gold rush to that of the crypto industry’s high-dollar funding race, saying that the many billions being funneled into AI companies and projects brings a “bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever.”

“Some of that has now spilled over into AI,” the CEO added, “which I think is a bit unfortunate.”

Caltech research shows Barkhausen noise in magnets can also arise from quantum mechanics, not just classical methods.

Researchers made quantum processors warmer and improve their efficiency.

Engineers from the University of New South Wales have achieved a new milestone in physics.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales made quantum processors warmer and improved their efficiency.

Continue reading “Engineers operate quantum processors at 20x warmer temperatures” »

As many as three billion tonnes of methane is released from hydroelectric power plants that could be repurposed as fuel if captured.

Researchers craft a facial robot that predicts human smiles and animates its face accordingly, advancing user-friendly robotic technologies.

A Boston Dynamic’s SPOT robotic dog has officially become the first of its kind to become a police dog hero. The robodog in question, a Massachusetts State Police SPOT unit, was shot in the line of duty.

According to the police department, the robodog’s actions may have saved human lives. Called “Roscoe,” the robot dog was involved in a police action to deal with a person barricaded in their home.

Dark matter is one of science’s greatest mysteries. It doesn’t absorb, reflect or emit light, so we can’t see it. But its presence is implied by the gravitational effects it appears to have on galaxies.

Although dark matter makes up about 85% of the cosmos, scientists know very little about its fundamental nature.

Theories abound, and research by Clemson University postdoctoral fellow Alex McDaniel provides some of the most stringent constraints on the nature of dark matter yet. His research also reveals a small hint of a signal that if real, could be confirmed sometime in the next decade or so.

Ching-Yao Tang and Ke-Jung Chen used the powerful supercomputer at Berkeley National Lab to create the world’s first high-resolution 3D hydrodynamics simulations of turbulent star-forming clouds for the first stars. Their results indicate that supersonic turbulence effectively fragments the star-forming clouds into several clumps, each with dense cores ranging from 22 to 175 solar masses, destined to form the first stars of masses of about 8 to 58 solar masses that agree well with the observation.

Furthermore, if the turbulence is weak or unresolved in the simulations, the researchers can reproduce similar results from previous simulations. This result first highlights the importance of turbulence in the first star formation and offers a promising pathway to decrease the theoretical mass scale of the first stars. It successfully reconciles the mass discrepancy between simulations and observations, providing a strong theoretical foundation for the first star formation.