Space scientists may have missed alien probes because they’re just too small.
That’s the bold claim from an astrophysicist who reckons we’ve been looking for extraterrestrial life the wrong way.
The argument is an attempt to explain the Fermi Paradox, a decades-old thought experiment.
Cells are the fundamental “building blocks” that make up living organisms. Yet, we don’t know exactly how cells were formed in the first place. We also don’t know what all the molecules that make up any natural cell do. Finally, we can’t yet put molecules together ourselves to make new synthetic cells.
Addressing the questions and challenges posed above requires significant collaboration and cooperation. The Build-a-Cell community welcomes all who wish to learn about and cooperate in the work of fully understanding and engineering a diversity of synthetic cells.
The future of biotechnology is in realizing fully understood, lineage agnostic organisms, beginning with single cells.
Quantum computers use the fundamentals of quantum mechanics to potentially speed up the process of solving complex computations. Suppose you need to perform the task of searching for a specific number in a phone book. A classical computer will search each line of the phone book until it finds a match. A quantum computer could search the entire phone book at the same time by assessing each line simultaneously and return a result much faster.
Such a system would give China the ability to rapidly and unpredictably access space with a reusable orbiter.
Researchers at Australia’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience are exploring new frontiers in healthcare and energy storage. Bec Crew reports.
A smartphone case made from artificial human-like skin responds to being pinched, tickled and stroked to add an extra layer of interactivity to the device.
Search and Rescue
This isn’t the first time a drone has proven invaluable in a search-and-rescue operation — we’ve seen others help save stranded swimmers, earthquake victims, and lost hikers.
Continue reading “Man Uses His Heat-Seeking Drone to Find Missing Child” »
NASA is keeping a watchful eye on the mid-November close approach of a behemoth space rock that is almost half the size of Ben Nevis and hurtling towards earth at 18,000 miles per hour.
Most species in Star Trek utilise Warp as their faster than light travel, but not all.
Some have created impressive alternatives to warp drive, such as catapults arrays and even sail ships.
This video looks at the practicality for Starfleet to adopt any of these methods of travel, their potential pros and cons.
If you liked this, maybe:
Transwarp: https://youtu.be/5N45D5TE9Oc
Borg Transwarp: https://youtu.be/FXJPzOEnnEE
Coaxial Warp: https://youtu.be/tU9VDK6Nrqk
To understand the fundamental nature of our universe, scientists would like to build particle colliders that accelerate electrons and their antimatter counterparts (positrons) to extreme energies (up to tera electron volts, or TeV). With conventional technology, however, this requires a machine that is enormously big and expensive (think 20 miles (32 km) long). To shrink the size and cost of these machines, the acceleration of the particles—how much energy they gain in a given distance—must be increased.
This is where plasma physics could have a dramatic impact: a wave of charged particles—a plasma wave—can provide this acceleration through its electric field. In a laser plasma accelerator, intense laser pulses are used to create a plasma wave with electric fields that can be thousands of times stronger than those attainable in conventional accelerators.
Recently, the team at Berkeley Lab’s BELLA Center doubled the previous world record for energy produced by laser plasma accelerators, generating electron beams with energies up to 7.8 billion electron volts (GeV) in an 8-inch-long plasma (20 cm). This would require about 300 feet (91 m)using conventional technology.
