Lifeboat Foundation

Humongous Fungus, a specimen of Armillaria ostoyae, has claimed the title of world’s largest single organism. Though it features honey mushrooms above ground, the bulk of this creature’s mass arises from its vast subterranean mycelial network of filamentous tendrils. It has spread across more than 2,000 acres of soil and weighs over 30,000 metric tons. Yet I would contend that Humongous Fungus represents a mere microcosm of the world’s true largest organism, a creature that I will call Cyborg Earth. What is Cyborg Earth? Eastern religions have suggested that all life is fundamentally interconnected. Cyborg Earth represents an extension of this concept.

All across the globe, biological life thrives. Quintillions upon quintillions of biomolecular computations happen every second, powering all life. Mycoplasma bacteria. Communities of leafcutter ants. The Humongous Fungus. Beloved beagles. Seasonal influenza viruses. Parasitic roundworms. Families of Canadian elk. Vast blooms of cyanobacteria. Humanity. Life works because of complexity that arises from simplicity that in turn arises from whatever inscrutable quantum mechanical rules lay beneath the molecular scale.

All creatures rearrange atoms in various ways. Termites and beavers rearrange larger bunches of atoms than most organisms. As humans progressed from paleolithic to metalwork to industrialization and then to the space age, information revolution, and era of artificial intelligence, they learned to converse with the atoms around them in an ever more complex fashion. We are actors in an operatic performance, we are subroutines of evolution, we are interwoven matryoshka patterns, an epic chemistry.

In the math of particle physics, every calculation should result in infinity. Physicists get around this by just ignoring certain parts of the equations — an approach that provides approximate answers. But by using the techniques known as “resurgence,” researchers hope to end the infinities and end up with perfectly precise predictions.

If the electron’s charge wasn’t perfectly round, it could reveal the existence of hidden particles. A new measurement approaches perfection.

Some classical computers have error correction built into their memories based on bits; quantum computers, to be workable in the future, will need error correction mechanisms, too, based on the vastly more sensitive qubits.

Cornell researchers have recently taken a step toward fault-tolerant quantum computing: they constructed a simple model containing exotic particles called non-Abelian anyons, compact and practical enough to run on modern quantum hardware. Realizing these particles, which can only exist in two dimensions, is a move towards implementing it in the real world.

Thanks to some creative thinking, Yuri Lensky, a former Bethe/Wilkins/Kavli Institute at Cornell (KIC) postdoctoral fellow in physics in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), collaborating with Eun-Ah Kim, professor of physics (A&S), came up with a simple “recipe” that could be used for robustly computing with non-Abelian anyons, including specific instructions for executing the effect experimentally on devices available today.

Scientists at Kyoto University have developed an experimental method to examine ultra-light dark matter by observing its gravitational effects on visible matter. Using millimeter-wave sensing in cryogenic conditions, the team achieved experimental parameters for unexplored mass ranges of dark photon.

A photon is a particle of light. It is the basic unit of light and other electromagnetic radiation, and is responsible for the electromagnetic force, one of the four fundamental forces of nature. Photons have no mass, but they do have energy and momentum. They travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, and can have different wavelengths, which correspond to different colors of light. Photons can also have different energies, which correspond to different frequencies of light.

A team of researchers designed a two-dimensional photonic time crystal that they say could have applications in technologies like transmitters and lasers.

Despite their name, photonic time crystals have little in common with time crystals, a phase of matter first proposed in 2012 and observed several years later. The fundamental commonality is that both crystals have structural patterns over time, but time crystals are quantum materials—the atoms are suspended in quantum states—while photonic time crystals are artificial materials not found in nature and they are not necessarily suspended in quantum states.

Researchers have put a sapphire crystal containing quadrillions of atoms into a superposition of quantum states, bringing quantum effects into the macroscopic world.

By Leah Crane

Scientists are still getting to grips with the ins and outs of strange materials known as time crystals; structures that buzz with movement for eternity. Now a new variety might help deepen our understanding of the perplexing state of matter.

Just as regular crystals are atoms and molecules that repeat over a volume of space, time crystals are collections of particles that tick-tock in patterns over a duration of time in ways that initially seem to defy science.

Theorized in 2012 before being observed in the lab for the first time just four years later, researchers have been busy tinkering with the structures to probe deeper foundations of particle physics and uncover potential applications.

Simultaneously detecting the gravitational-wave and neutrino signals emitted during the last second of a massive star’s life could show how such stars die.