Lifeboat Foundation

Carbon nanotubes are one of the most elastically strong materials out there.

When I was a kid, I used to take allowance money and occasionally buy rubber-band-powered balsa wood airplanes at a local store. Maybe you’ve seen these. You wind up the rubber band, which stretches the elastomer and stores energy in the elastic strain of the polymer, as in Hooke’s Law (though I suspect the rubber band goes well beyond the linear regime when it’s really wound up, because of the higher order twisting that happens). Rhett Alain wrote about how well you can store energy like this. It turns out that the stored energy per mass of the rubber band can get pretty substantial.

Carbon nanotubes are one of the most elastically strong materials out there. A bit over a decade ago, a group at Michigan State did a serious theoretical analysis of how much energy you could store in a twisted yarn made from single-walled carbon nanotubes. They found that the specific energy storage could get as large as several MJ/kg, as much as four times what you get with lithium ion batteries!

Continue reading “Wind-up nanotechnology” »

The newest SpaceX spacesuit has increased mobility, a slimmer design, and even features a head-up display in the helmet.

“They just have to stay underneath the tip until the light field changes its direction to be able to return.” By looking at an atomically thin insulator—a material that resists electrons spreading—the physicists got a first glimpse of these ultrafast matter currents and can now look into previously hidden atomic-scale dynamics in insulating layers ubiquitous in electronics and photovoltaics.

These new results present a groundbreaking advance in optical microscopy, bringing it to the ultimate length and time scales simultaneously. Direct observation of ultrafast tunneling currents could enable unprecedented understanding of electronic dynamics in quantum materials and quantum platforms for computing and data storage.

NOTE furthermore opens the door to atomic-scale strong-field dynamics such as lightwave electronics. The discovery of this communication channel with the quantum world could, just like Hertz’s findings over 100 years ago, spark a revolution in information transfer. Moreover, it could be key to understanding the microscopic dynamics shaping the devices of tomorrow.

“However, being an indirect semiconductor, its utilization in optoelectronics has been hindered by poor optical properties.”

“While silicon does not naturally emit light in its bulk form, porous and nanostructured silicon can produce detectable light after being exposed to visible radiation.”

Scientists have been aware of this phenomenon for decades, but the precise origins of the illumination have been the subject of debate.

Since the discovery of quantum mechanics more than a hundred years ago, it has been known that electrons in molecules can be coupled to the motion of the atoms that make up the molecules. Often referred to as molecular vibrations, the motion of atoms act like tiny springs, undergoing periodic motion. For electrons in these systems, being joined to the hip with these vibrations means they are constantly in motion too, dancing to the tune of the atoms, on timescales of a millionth of a billionth of a second.

But all this dancing around leads to a loss of energy and limits the performance of organic molecules in applications like organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), infrared sensors and fluorescent biomarkers used in the study of cells and for tagging diseases such as cancer cells.

Now, researchers using laser-based spectroscopic techniques have discovered ‘new molecular design rules’ capable of halting this molecular dance. Their results, reported in Nature (“Decoupling excitons from high-frequency vibrations in organic molecules”), revealed crucial design principles that can stop the coupling of electrons to atomic vibrations, in effect shutting down their hectic dancing and propelling the molecules to achieve unparalleled performance.

Can we address mysteries of quantum mechanics by supposing that properties of objects long considered to have an independent existence are actually determined solely in relation to other objects or observers?

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Is Quantum Reality in the Eye of the Beholder?” »

Dive into the deepest quantum mystery: how do we transition from a haze of possibilities to the concrete reality we experience? Does the answer require a profusion of universes, each shaped by different quantum outcomes?

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Continue reading “Does Quantum Mechanics Imply Multiple Universes?” »

Inside every plant, animal and human cell are billions of molecular machines. They’re made up of proteins, DNA and other molecules, but no single piece works on its own. Only by seeing how they interact together, across millions of types of combinations, can we start to truly understand life’s processes.

In a paper published in Nature, we introduce AlphaFold 3, a revolutionary model that can predict the structure and interactions of all life’s molecules with unprecedented accuracy. For the interactions of proteins with other molecule types we see at least a 50% improvement compared with existing prediction methods, and for some important categories of interaction we have doubled prediction accuracy.

We hope AlphaFold 3 will help transform our understanding of the biological world and drug discovery. Scientists can access the majority of its capabilities, for free, through our newly launched AlphaFold Server, an easy-to-use research tool. To build on AlphaFold 3’s potential for drug design, Isomorphic Labs is already collaborating with pharmaceutical companies to apply it to real-world drug design challenges and, ultimately, develop new life-changing treatments for patients.

Astronomy Magazine — Project Lyra is the cover feature!

A big thank you to Maciej Rebisz for the images and the entire Project Lyra team for the research work!

Continue reading “Project Lyra — Exploring Interstellar Objects” »