Lifeboat Foundation

I guess they can now make the diamond sword from minecraft! 😃

While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a new technique where they not only form quickly, but do so at room temperature.

Continue reading “Scientists produce rare diamonds in minutes at room temperature” »

The first radio burst discovered in the Milky Way is now repeating as it travels from a magnetar – a neutron star with a strong magnetic field – 32,616 light-years away.

The initial flash of energy was first detected in April and scientist have identified two more, confirming fast radio bursts ‘are emitted by magnetars at cosmological distances.’

Continue reading “First fast radio burst discovered in the Milky Way is now repeating” »

Shantanu Chakrabartty’s laboratory has been working to create sensors that can run on the least amount of energy. His lab has been so successful at building smaller and more efficient sensors, that they’ve run into a roadblock in the form of a fundamental law of physics.

Sometimes, however, when you hit what appears to be an impenetrable roadblock, you just have to turn to quantum physics and tunnel through it. That’s what Chakrabartty and other researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis did.

The development of these self-powered quantum sensors from the lab of Chakrabartty, the Clifford W. Murphy Professor in the Preston M. Green Department of Systems & Electrical Engineering, was published online Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Communications.

Scientists have detected two bright radio bursts from a magnetar in our galaxy, as they get closer to discovering the source of the blasts.

Earlier this month, scientists discovered that fast radio bursts were coming from the object, in a major breakthrough in the search for the source of those mysterious blasts of energy. It was the first time an FRB had been detected coming from inside our Milky Way, and also the first time such a blast had been traced back to a particular source.

Now scientists say they have found new bursts coming from that same magnetar. That should help further indicate whether it is really a source of FRBs – and whether the same process could be powering those bursts we have discovered coming from elsewhere in the universe.

Generating electricity from oncoming traffic is a genius idea! ⚡ 🙌.

It seems the rise of hydrogen as the clean fuel for the future is coming closer to reality.

A viable substitute for fossil fuels, hydrogen has been struggling to gain traction for years — but thanks to Europe, that could soon change.

O,.o.

Physicists from MIPT and Vladimir State University, Russia, have converted light energy into surface waves on graphene with nearly 90% efficiency. They relied on a laser-like energy conversion scheme and collective resonances. The paper was published in Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Manipulating light at the nanoscale is a task crucial for being able to create ultracompact devices for optical energy conversion and storage. To localize light on such a small scale, researchers convert optical radiation into so-called surface plasmon-polaritons. These SPPs are oscillations propagating along the interface between two materials with drastically different refractive indices—specifically, a metal and a dielectric or air. Depending on the materials chosen, the degree of surface wave localization varies. It is the strongest for light localized on a material only one atomic layer thick, because such 2-D materials have high refractive indices.

Continue reading “No losses: Scientists stuff graphene with light” »

french start-up hy-generation has unveiled a new type of electric thruster, equipped with patented self-adjusting blades that improve the performance (thrust and speed) and autonomy of ships. dubbed the electro propulsion PM5kW, this top class electric thruster has been designed essentially for OEM and electric project conversion, suitable for licenseless navigation.

developed to meet the need for expertise and engineering on technologies that profoundly change the energy landscape: fuel cells and hydrogen, hy-generation integrates the latest practices in permanent magnet electric motors with the patented self-adjustable blade system to set a new standard in terms of performance and efficiency. after two years of development, the technology has been refined to be adapted to slow, high displacement boats.

In a remote galaxy, two neutron stars circled one another in a ballet of ultimate destruction and inevitable creation. Both objects were the remnants of massive stars, probably from a binary system, that had become supernovae long before. Each was incredibly massive, with neutrons so closely packed that their cores became diamond. The dance, alas, could not go on forever and the stars collided, releasing unimaginable energy and sending gravitational waves speeding through the fabric of space-time.

In 2017, 1.3 billion years later, astronomers detected those waves with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Albert Einstein’s prediction that the universe should be filled with such faint ripples caused by gravity from massive objects included sources such as neutron star mergers. Yet finding a disturbance in the fabric of space-time from this kind of event had proven elusive until then. When news of the detection of gravitational waves broke, the media wanted to know what else happens when neutron stars collide. Astronomers explained that, beyond the destruction of the stars and the ripples in space, such events also create all the heavy elements we know in the blink of an eye. But what did the media key into? That gold comes from outer space.