Lifeboat Foundation

To physics, time has no direction. Until you come along and give it a past, present, and future.

Realistic hover cars coming to future near you.

The quest to know the mysterious recipe for high-temperature superconductivity, which could enable revolutionary advances in technologies that make or use electricity, just took a big leap forward thanks to new research by an international team of experimental and theoretical physicists.

The research paper appears in the journal Science on Sept. 16, 2016. The research is focused on revealing the mysterious ingredients required for high-temperature superconductivity — the ability of a material’s electrons to pair up and travel without friction at relatively high temperatures, enabling them to lose no energy — to be super efficient — while conducting electricity.

Continue reading “Closing in on high-temperature superconductivity” »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrSCinkFUtA

Is building our own starship Enterprise possible? Will we ever travel between the stars as easily as they do in Star Trek? JJ Abrams’ new feature, Star Trek Into Darkness, hits the screen in a golden age of scientific discoveries. HISTORY is there, giving viewers a deep look behind the scenes, on the set, and into the science–amazing new exoplanets, the physics of Warp drive, and the ideas behind how we might one day live in a Star Trek Universe.

A team of physicists from the US, Germany and Russia have devised a method of detecting blood clotting with the help of a laser beam, RIA Novosti reported, citing an article carried by the latest issue of PLOS ONE scientific journal.

“We have demonstrated how you can detect blood clots using photoacoustic flow-cytometry. We will potentially be able to destroy them right away, but this requires additional research,” Alexander Melerzanov, a senior fellow at Moscow’s Institute of Physics and Technology, told RIA.

Formation of clots in the blood stream is the main cause of strokes and heart attacks. Breaking loose in the bloodstream they can clog arteries often resulting in a patient’s death.

Continue reading “Scientists Find a Way to Destroy Blood Clots With Laser Beam” »

In a new interview, Elon Musk identifies genetics, AI, and brain bandwidth as three areas in which today’s youth can have the biggest impact on the future. However, he doesn’t think an idea needs to be revolutionary to be worthwhile.

While many 2o-something-year-olds are just finding their way in the world, young Elon Musk was already looking for ways to change it way back in 1995 (when he was that age).

Continue reading “Elon Musk: These Are the 5 Most Important Problems We Need to Solve” »

Consciousness isn’t something scientists like to talk about much. You can’t see it, you can’t touch it, and despite the best efforts of certain researchers, you can’t quantify it. And in science, if you can’t measure something, you’re going to have a tough time explaining it.

But consciousness exists, and it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of what makes us human. And just like dark matter and dark energy have been used to fill some otherwise gaping holes in the standard model of physics, researchers have also proposed that it’s possible to consider consciousness as a new state of matter.

Continue reading “This physicist says consciousness could be a new state of matter” »

The implications of the discovery of hydrogen in a metallic form make it a subject of great fervor. Teams are racing toward its use as a superconductor as well as a means of better understanding the universe.

The simplest and most common element, first in the periodic table, shouldn’t be difficult to crack, right? “What could be more simple than an assembly of electrons and protons?” asks Neil Aschcroft, a theoretical physicist at Cornell University. Yet, its supposed metallic form is quite the opposite. Apparently, the physics of hydrogen becomes more complex at high pressures. A sort of mega-evolution.

Hydrogen is naturally at a gaseous state, at room temperature and under atmospheric pressure. But hydrogen becomes solid, given enough of a forceful squeeze or at low temperatures. It also can transform into a liquid, if heat is added while squeezing. What is more confounding is the supposed ability of hydrogen, theoretically, to transform into metal if more extreme conditions are applied.

Continue reading “Physicists Are Close to Producing Metallic Hydrogen, And It Could Change Everything” »

China’s 2nd spacelab launches next week. Now, I wonder how QSS will be leveraged given the note on new communication capabilities as well as other types of experiments that can be conducted.

Chinese space agency is all set to launch its second spacelab Tiangong-2 next week. Long March 2F rocket will lift up the spacelab and both the entities have been transported to the launch pad located at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, yesterday. Tiangong-2 will test life support systems and refueling technology for its 60 ton modular space station.

Tiangong-2 will be placed in an orbit of 393 kilometers above the Earth and it will help in studying fundamental physics, biology, fluid mechanics in microgravity, space science and will monitor Earth from space. In addition, it has the capability to measure the topography of the oceans with very high precision which will enable scientists to study Earth’s gravity field.

Continue reading “Tiangong-2: Second space lab” »

Physicists have for the first time succeeded in directly visualising on small scales how a material abruptly changes its state from conducting to insulating at low temperatures. Researchers Erik van Heumen of the University of Amsterdam and Alex McLeod from the University of California thereby provide evidence for a 60-year-old theory that explains this phenomenon and pave the way for more energy efficient technologies. The team’s experiments are described in the latest edition of Nature Physics.

Materials that conduct electricity at high temperature but are insulating at lower temperatures have been known for decades. However, until recently it was not possible to directly measure how such phase transitions proceed on small length scales. Using a new technique, Van Heumen and McLeod are now able to visualise the changes taking place in the material during such a phase transition on the nanometer scale.

In their experiments, the team observed a so-called percolation transition taking place among the electrons in the material. Above a certain critical temperature, the electrons can move relatively easily through the material enabling the flow of electrical current. When the temperature drops below a threshold temperature, small imperfections in the material trigger a kind of traffic jam for the electrons. Starting from small nanometer length scales, this traffic jam slowly grows outwards across the entire material. The previously freely moving electrons come to an abrupt halt and the material loses its conducting properties.