Lifeboat Foundation

Quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity form the bedrock of the current understanding of physics—yet the two theories don’t seem to work together. Physical phenomena rely on relationship of motion between the observed and the observer. Certain rules hold true across types of observed objects and those observing, but those rules tend to break down at the quantum level, where subatomic particles behave in strange ways.

An international team of researchers developed a unified framework that would account for this apparent break down between classical and quantum physics, and they put it to the test using a quantum satellite called Micius. They published their results ruling out one version of their theory on Sept 19th in Science.

Micius is part of a Chinese research project called Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS), in which researchers can examine the relationship with quantum and classical physics using light experiments. In this study, the researchers used the satellite to produce and measure two entangled particles.

An international research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute; AEI) in Hannover has discovered that the radio pulsar J0952-0607 also emits pulsed gamma radiation. J0952-0607 spins 707 times in one second and is second in the list of rapidly rotating neutron stars. By analyzing about 8.5 years worth of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, LOFAR radio observations from the past two years, observations from two large optical telescopes, and gravitational-wave data from the LIGO detectors, the team used a multi-messenger approach to study the binary system of the pulsar and its lightweight companion in detail. Their study published in the Astrophysical Journal shows that extreme pulsar systems are hiding in the Fermi catalogs and motivates further searches. Despite being very extensive, the analysis also raises new unanswered questions about this system.

Pulsars are the compact remnants of stellar explosions which have strong magnetic fields and are rapidly rotating. They emit radiation like a cosmic lighthouse and can be observable as radio pulsars and/or gamma-ray pulsars depending on their orientation towards Earth.

An international team of researchers led by scientists at Princeton University has found that a magnetic material at room temperature enables electrons to behave counterintuitively, acting collectively rather than as individuals. Their collective behavior mimics massless particles and anti-particles that coexist in an unexpected way and together form an exotic loop-like structure.

The key to this behavior is topology—a branch of mathematics that is already known to play a powerful role in dictating the behavior of electrons in crystals. Topological materials can contain massless particles in the form of light, or photons. In a topological crystal, the electrons often behave like slowed-down light yet, unlike light, carry electrical charge.

Topology has seldom been observed in magnetic materials, and the finding of a magnetic topological material at room temperature is a step forward that could unlock new approaches to harnessing topological materials for future technological applications.

Of the major food crops, only rice is currently able to survive flooding. Thanks to new research, that could soon change—good news for a world in which rains are increasing in both frequency and intensity.

The research, newly published in Science, studied how other crops compare to rice when submerged in water. It found that the plants—a wild-growing tomato, a tomato used for farming and a plant similar to alfalfa—all share at least 68 families of genes in common that are activated in response to flooding.

Rice was domesticated from wild species that grew in tropical regions, where it adapted to endure monsoons and waterlogging. Some of the genes involved in that adaptation exist in the other plants but have not evolved to switch on when the roots are being flooded.

A study led by researchers at Indiana University is the first to find similarities between the organization of chromosomes in humans and archaea. The discovery could support the use of archaea in research to understand human diseases related to errors in cellular gene expression, such as cancer.

The lead author on the study is Stephen Bell, a professor of biology and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. The study will publish Sept. 19 in the journal Cell.

The similar clustering of DNA in humans and archaeal chromosomes is significant because certain genes activate or deactivate based upon how they’re folded.

Researchers have made news in letting their AI ambitions play out a formidable game of hide and seek with formidable results. The agents’ environment had walls and movable boxes for a challenge where some were the hiders and others, seekers. Much happened along the way, with surprises.

Stating what was learned, the authors blogged: “We’ve observed agents discovering progressively more complex tool use while playing a simple game of hide-and-seek,” where the agents built “a series of six distinct strategies and counterstrategies, some of which we did not know our environment supported.”

Continue reading “AI: Agents show surprising behavior in hide and seek game” »

How long the battery of your phone or computer lasts depends on how many lithium ions can be stored in the battery’s negative electrode material. If the battery runs out of these ions, it can’t generate an electrical current to run a device and ultimately fails.

Materials with a higher lithium ion storage capacity are either too heavy or the wrong shape to replace graphite, the electrode material currently used in today’s batteries.

Purdue University scientists and engineers have introduced a potential way that these materials could be restructured into a new electrode design that would allow them to increase a battery’s lifespan, make it more stable and shorten its charging time.

A team of scientists has developed a computational model that uses artificial intelligence to find sites for hydropower dams in order to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Hydropower dams can provide large quantities of energy with carbon footprints as low as sources like solar and wind. But because of how they’re formed, some dams emit dangerously high levels of greenhouse gases, threatening sustainability goals.

With hundreds of hydropower dams currently proposed for the Amazon basin—an ecologically sensitive area covering more than a third of South America—predicting their greenhouse emissions in advance could be critical for the region, and the planet.

A Ph.D. student at the University of Alberta has discovered a new and curious mineral inside a diamond unearthed from a mine in South Africa.

The mineral—named goldschmidtite in honor of Victor Moritz Goldschmidt, the founder of modern geochemistry—has an unusual chemical signature for a mineral from Earth’s mantle, explained Nicole Meyer, a graduate student in the Diamond Exploration Research and Training School.

“Goldschmidtite has high concentrations of niobium, potassium and the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium, whereas the rest of the mantle is dominated by other elements, such as magnesium and iron,” said Meyer.