Lifeboat Foundation

Deep inside a mountain in central Italy, scientists are laying a trap for dark matter. The bait? A big metal tank full of 3.5 tons (3,200 kilograms) of pure liquid xenon. This noble gas is one of the cleanest, most radiation-proof substances on Earth, making it an ideal target for capturing some of the rarest particle interactions in the universe.

It all sounds vaguely sinister; said Christian Wittweg, a doctoral candidate at the University of Münster in Germany, who has worked with the so-called Xenon collaboration for half a decade, going to work every day feels like “paying a Bond villain a visit.” So far, the mountain-dwelling researchers haven’t captured any dark matter. But they recently succeeded in detecting one of the rarest particle interactions in the universe. [11 Biggest Unanswered Questions About Dark Matter]

According to a new study published today (April 24) in the journal Nature, the team of more than 100 researchers measured, for the first time ever, the decay of a xenon-124 atom into a tellurium 124 atom through an extremely rare process called two-neutrino double electron capture. This type of radioactive decay occurs when an atom’s nucleus absorbs two electrons from its outer electron shell simultaneously, thereby releasing a double dose of the ghostly particles called neutrinos.

Continue reading “Researchers Just Measured an Atom with a Half-Life of 18 Sextillion Years” »

Negative pressure governs not only the Universe or the quantum vacuum. This phenomenon, although of a different nature, appears also in liquid crystals confined in nanopores. At the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow, a method has been presented that for the first time makes it possible to estimate the amount of negative pressure in spatially limited liquid crystal systems.

At first glance, negative pressure appears to be an exotic phenomenon. In fact, it is common in nature, and what’s more, occurs on many scales. On the scale of the Universe, the cosmological constant is responsible for accelerating the expansion of spacetime. In the world of plants, attracting intermolecular forces (not: expanding thermal motions) guarantee the flow of water to the treetops of all trees taller than ten metres. On the quantum scale, the pressure of virtual particles of a false vacuum leads to the creation of an attractive force, appearing, for example, between two parallel metal plates (the famous Casimir effect).

“The fact that a negative pressure appears in liquid crystals confined in nanopores was already known. However, it was not known how to measure this pressure. Although we also cannot do this directly, we have proposed a method that allows this pressure to be reliably estimated,” says Dr. Tomasz Rozwadowski from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow, the first author of a publication in the Journal of Molecular Liquids.

Continue reading “Liquid crystals in nanopores produce a surprisingly large negative pressure” »

Ecstadelic Media Group releases a new non-fiction book The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology by Alex M. Vikoulov as a Kindle ebook (Press Release, San Francisco, CA, USA, April 22, 2019 01.00 PM PST)

The Science and Philosophy of Information book series is adapted for general audience and based on the previously published grand volume titled “ The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution” by digital philosopher Alex Vikoulov on the ultimate nature of reality, consciousness, the physics of time, and philosophy of mind. In this book one of the series, the author addresses some of the most flaming questions in science and philosophy: Where do we come from? What are the origins of us? What is our role in the grand scheme of things?

“# 1 Hot New Release” in Amazon charts in Cosmology and Evolution, the book starts with a story that happened almost exactly 400 years ago that has had a tremendous “butterfly” effect on us modern humans.

Continue reading “The Origins of Us: Evolutionary Emergence and The Omega Point Cosmology — A New Book That Makes You Question The Nature of Reality but Provides You with Surprising Answers | Press Release” »

The discovery of a similar galaxy, previously found in March 2018, was met with praise and criticism as it defies existing dark matter theory.

Now that they’ve identified the Higgs boson, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have set their sights on an even more elusive target.

All around us is dark matter and dark energy—the invisible stuff that binds the galaxy together, but which no one has been able to directly detect. “We know for sure there’s a dark world, and there’s more energy in it than there is in ours,” said LianTao Wang, a University of Chicago professor of physics who studies how to find signals in large particle accelerators like the LHC.

Wang, along with scientists from the University and UChicago-affiliated Fermilab, think they may be able to lead us to its tracks; in a paper published April 3 in Physical Review Letters, they laid out an innovative method for stalking dark matter in the LHC by exploiting a potential particle’s slightly slower speed.

Continue reading “Scientists invent way to trap mysterious ‘dark world’ particle at Large Hadron Collider” »

Scientists have used the tiny distortions imprinted on the cosmic microwave background by the gravity of matter throughout the universe, recorded by ESA’s Planck satellite, to uncover the connection between the luminosity of quasars – the bright cores of active galaxies – and the mass of the much larger ‘halos’ of dark matter in which they sit. The result is an important confirmation for our understanding of how galaxies evolve across cosmic history.

Most galaxies in the universe are known to host supermassive black holes, with masses of millions to billions of times the Sun’s mass, at their cores. The majority of these cosmic monsters are ‘dormant’, with little or no activity going on near them, but about one percent are classified as ‘active’, accreting matter from their surroundings at very intense rates. This accretion process causes material in the black hole’s vicinity to shine brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, making these active galaxies, or quasars, some of the brightest sources in the cosmos.

While it is still unclear what activates these black holes, switching on and off their phase of intense accretion, it is likely that quasars play an important role in regulating the evolution of galaxies across cosmic history. For this reason, it is crucial to understand the relationship between quasars, their host galaxies, and their environment on even larger scales.

Continue reading “Planck reveals link between active galaxies and their dark matter environment” »

When the universe formed during the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, the chemical reactions of the aftermath formed the first molecules. Those first molecules were crucial in helping form everything we know, but they’re also absent.

And although HeH+, the helium hydride ion, has been proposed for years as that first molecule, scientists couldn’t find any evidence of its existence in space — until now. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

After the Big Bang, HeH+ formed in a molecular bond when helium atoms and protons combined. Later, these would break apart into hydrogen molecules and helium atoms. Both elements are the two most abundant throughout the universe, with hydrogen first and helium second.

Continue reading “Scientists have detected the earliest Big Bang molecule in space” »

Back in the ancient universe, shortly after the Big Bang, the first atoms formed out of free particles. Only light elements like hydrogen and helium could form at high temperatures, but as the universe cooled, those atoms turned into every single thing we see in our world today. And now, scientists have spotted the type of molecule that formed the very first time two atoms combined.

Theories have predicted for decades that the first molecule that could form would be between the first two elements: hydrogen and helium. But the “helium hydride” molecule, as it’s known, had never been spotted before, Gizmodo explained. This led to some doubt as to whether this theory could even be true. But thanks to a modified Boeing 747 dubbed SOFIA, or Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, we have finally detected the elusive molecule in a far-off nebula called NGC 7027.

Now that it’s confirmed that the universe is capable of forming the helium hydride molecule naturally, this knowledge is helping astronomers better understand how the universe worked in the time just after the Big Bang. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, has made sense of the “dawn of chemistry,” the authors state. Read more about this exciting find at Gizmodo. Shivani Ishwar.

Continue reading “Scientists detect the oldest type of molecule in the universe” »

Training bigger neural networks can be challenging when faced with accelerator memory limits. The size of the datasets being used by machine learning models is very large nowadays. For example, a standard image classification datasets like hashtagged Instagram contains millions of images. With the increasing quality of the images, the memory required will also increase. Today, the memory available on NVIDIA GPUs is only 32 GB.

Therefore, there needs to be a tradeoff between memory allocated for the features in a model and how the network gets activated. It is only understandable why the accelerator memory limit needs to be breached.

Continue reading “Reaching Into The Parallel Universe With Intel’s Xeon Processor” »