Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 8780

On a metal workbench covered with tools, instruments, cords, and bottles of solution, Aaron Yevick is using laser light to create a force field with which to move particles of matter.

Yevick is an optical engineer who came to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, full-time earlier this year. Despite being in his current position with NASA less than a year, Yevick received funding from the Goddard Fellows Innovation Challenge (GFIC) — a research and development program focused on supporting riskier, less mature technologies — to advance his work.

His goal is to fly the technology aboard the International Space Station, where astronauts could experiment with it in microgravity. Eventually, he believes the technology could help researchers explore other planets, moons, and comets by helping them collect and study samples.

Read more | >

We’re continuing to release talks from Ending Age-Related Diseases 2019, our highly successful two-day conference that featured talks from leading researchers and investors, bringing them together to discuss the future of aging and rejuvenation biotechnology.

Huda Suliman of Icaria Life Sciences discussed her company’s role in the rejuvenation biotechnology ecosystem, including small molecule drug discovery and drug screening along with how her company deals with irreproducibility in the scientific literature. She explained how species differences are an issue, and she explained the differences between aging-focused and traditional medical research.

Read more | >

A group of astronomers led by University of California, Davis has obtained new data that suggest the universe is expanding more rapidly than predicted.

The study comes on the heels of a hot debate over just how fast the universe is ballooning; measurements thus far are in disagreement.

The team’s new measurement of the Hubble Constant, or the expansion rate of the universe, involved a different method. They used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in combination with W. M. Keck Observatory’s Adaptive Optics (AO) system to observe three gravitationally-lensed systems. This is the first time ground-based AO technology has been used to obtain the Hubble Constant.

Read more | >

In a theoretical study, physicists propose that perturbations in the orbit of stars near supermassive black holes could be used to detect wormholes.

A new study outlines a method for detecting a speculative phenomenon that has long captured the imagination of sci-fi fans: wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.

Such pathways could connect one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different universe altogether.

Read more | >

A new study outlines a method for detecting a speculative phenomenon that has long captured the imagination of sci-fi fans: wormholes, which form a passage between two separate regions of spacetime.

Such pathways could connect one area of our universe to a different time and/or place within our universe, or to a different universe altogether.

Whether wormholes exist is up for debate. But in a paper published on Oct. 10 in Physical Review D, physicists describe a technique for detecting these bridges.

Read more | >

Entanglement is one of the properties specific to quantum particles. When two photons become entangled, for instance, the quantum state of the first will correlate perfectly with the quantum state of the second, even if they are at a distance from one another. But what happens when three pairs of entangled photons are placed in a network? Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working in partnership with Tehran’s Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), have proved that this arrangement allows for a new form of quantum correlation in theory. When the scientists forced two photons from separate pairs to become entangled, the connection was also made with their twin photon present elsewhere in the network, forming a highly-correlated triangle. These results, which you can read all about in the journal Physical Review Letters, create the potential for new applications in cryptography while reviving quantum physics at its most fundamental level.

Entanglement involves two quantum particles – photons, for example – forming a single physical system in spite of the distance between them. Every action performed on one of the two photons has an impact on its “twin” photon. This principle of entanglement leads to quantum non-locality: the measurements and statistics of the properties observed on one of the photons are very closely correlated with the measurements made on the other photon. “Quantum non-locality was discovered theoretically by John Stewart Bell in 1964,” begins Nicolas Brunner, associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics in UNIGE’s Faculty of Science. “This showed that photon correlations are exclusively quantum in nature, and so can’t be explained by conventional physics. This principle could be used to generate ultra-secure encryption keys.”

Read more | >

When a guitar string is plucked, it vibrates as any vibrating object would, rising and falling like a wave, as the laws of classical physics predict. But under the laws of quantum mechanics, which describe the way physics works at the atomic scale, vibrations should behave not only as waves, but also as particles. The same guitar string, when observed at a quantum level, should vibrate as individual units of energy known as phonons.

Now scientists at MIT and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology have for the first time created and observed a single phonon in a common material at room temperature.

Until now, single phonons have only been observed at ultracold temperatures and in precisely engineered, microscopic materials that researchers must probe in a vacuum. In contrast, the team has created and observed single phonons in a piece of diamond sitting in open air at room temperature. The results, the researchers write in a paper published today in Physical Review X, “bring quantum behavior closer to our daily life.”

Read more | >