Lifeboat Foundation

There’s a hot new BEC in town that has nothing to do with bacon, egg, and cheese. You won’t find it at your local bodega, but in the coldest place in New York: the lab of Columbia physicist Sebastian Will, whose experimental group specializes in pushing atoms and molecules to temperatures just fractions of a degree above absolute zero.

Converting CO₂ into fuel and chemicals using electricity, also known as electrochemical conversion of CO₂, is a promising way to reduce emissions. This process allows us to use carbon captured from industries and the atmosphere and turn it into resources that we usually get from fossil fuels.

Scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory have discovered spin coherence in Hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) under normal conditions, offering new prospects for quantum technology applications.

Cavendish Laboratory researchers have discovered that a single ‘atomic defect’ in a material known as Hexagonal Boron Nitride (hBN) maintains spin coherence at room temperature and can be manipulated using light.

Spin coherence refers to an electronic spin being capable of retaining quantum information over time. The discovery is significant because materials that can host quantum properties under ambient conditions are quite rare.

In May 2022, the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University (MSU), launched its precision measurement program. Staff from FRIB’s Low Energy Beam and Ion Trap (LEBIT) facility take high-energy, rare-isotope beams generated at FRIB and cool them to a lower energy state. Afterward, the researchers measure specific particles’ masses at high precision.

Miniaturizing night vision could therefore lead to widespread adoption. Creating night vision filters that weigh less than a gram and can sit as a film across a pair of traditional spectacles opens up new, everyday applications.

Consumer night vision glasses that allow the user to see the visible and infrared spectrum at the same time could result in safer driving in the dark, safer nighttime walks, and less hassle working in low-light conditions that currently require bulky and often uncomfortable headlamps.

In research published in Advanced Materials, TMOS researchers from the Australian National University demonstrate enhanced infrared vision non-linear upconversion technology using a non-local lithium niobate metasurface.

The game-changing technique could cut costs and time.

Advances in gene editing technology have led to the first successful transplant of a pig kidney into a human.

Recent high profile controversies haven’t deterred scientists from searching for one of research’s ultimate prizes: room temperature superconductors. Kit Chapman reports on the claims.

In July 2023, the world became obsessed with superconductivity. Two pre-prints from a group in South Korea claimed that a copper-doped lead-apatite, dubbed LK-99 after its two proposers, Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon, was a superconductor at room temperature and ambient pressure. The claims spread across social media, with both seasoned groups and amateur chemists trying to recreate the material. By August, a consensus was reached that LK-99 was yet another dead end, and not a superconductor at all.

Continue reading “Superconductivity: the search and the scandal” »

In the brain, timekeeping is done with neurons that relax at different rates after receiving a signal; now memristors—hardware analogs of neurons—can do that too.

Artificial neural networks may soon be able to process time-dependent information, such as audio and video data, more efficiently. The first memristor with a ‘relaxation time’ that can be tuned is reported today in Nature Electronics, in a study led by the University of Michigan.

Energy Efficiency and AI.