Lifeboat Foundation

How can studying an exoplanet’s ozone help astronomers better understand its habitability potential? This is what a recent study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society hopes to address as a team of international researchers investigated how an ozone on the nearest exoplanet to Earth, Proxima Centauri b, could influence its own climate over time. This study holds the potential to help astronomers better understand how an exoplanet’s ozone could influence its formation, evolution, and potential habitability, and could have implications on how astronomers study Earth-like exoplanets throughout the cosmos.

“Imagine a world where ozone affects temperature and wind speed and holds the key to a planet’s very habitability,” said Dr. Assaf Hochman, who is a senior lecturer in the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a co-author on the study. “Our study unveils this intricate connection and underscores the importance of considering interactive ozone and other photochemical species in our quest to understand Earth-like exoplanets.”

For the study, the researchers used a series of computer simulations to ascertain how an active ozone on Proxima Centauri b could influence the exoplanet’s climate and potential habitability. In the end, the researchers discovered that an ozone layer on Proxima Centauri b could greatly influence the temperature and wind circulation patterns throughout its atmosphere. Additionally, they also found altitude also played a high role in the atmospheric temperature and temperature variances, as well. The researchers emphasized how these findings could help future researchers better understand the potential habitability of an exoplanet, noting how a potential ozone layer on Proxima Centauri b could greatly influence its climate.

The number of tornadoes so far in the United States this year is just above average. But their distribution is changing.

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents.

The company announced Wednesday that it raised $9 million in an oversubscribed seed round, co-led by First Spark Ventures (Eric Schmidt’s deep-tech fund) and Patron (the seed stage fund co-founded by Riot Games alums).

The funding follows Altera’s previous raising a pre-seed $2 million from a16z SPEEDRUN and others in January of this year. Now, Altera wants to use the new capital to hire more scientists, engineers, and team members to help with product development and growth.

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?” »