Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s first self-sufficient sea vessel, Energy Observer, is due to leave her home port of Saint-Malo in Brittany, France, over the next few days on the first leg of a global voyage to test and promote renewable energy technologies.

This isn’t just any yacht though, it uses nothing but renewable energy sources to run. Specifically, it produces hydrogen from seawater with zero CO₂ emissions and zero fine particles.

At a quantum level, the vanishingly tiny particles that make up the building blocks of everything don’t even have a set location, just a smear of possible positions dictated by complex rules of probability.

And theoretical physicist Sean Carroll is entirely happy with that. He says that the fact that tiny particles like electrons and photons don’t have one set place in the universe is evidence that there are many parallel universes.

Dyson helped create modern particle physics, criticized nuclear weapons tests, and imagined how civilizations could take to the stars.

Most ordinary matter is held together by an invisible subatomic glue known as the strong nuclear force—one of the four fundamental forces in nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak force. The strong nuclear force is responsible for the push and pull between protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus, which keeps an atom from collapsing in on itself.

In atomic nuclei, most protons and neutrons are far enough apart that physicists can accurately predict their interactions. However, these predictions are challenged when the subatomic particles are so close as to be practically on top of each other.

While such ultrashort-distance interactions are rare in most matter on Earth, they define the cores of neutron stars and other extremely dense astrophysical objects. Since scientists first began exploring nuclear physics, they have struggled to explain how the strong nuclear force plays out at such ultrashort distances.

You know what this world needs now… aside from love, sweet love, of course? Less nuclear waste. But it also seemingly needs more and more power, which nuclear would be great at providing, if not for all that pesky waste and those darn radioactive meltdowns that can happen when you go around splitting atoms (fission). Which is where nuclear fusion was supposed to help out, but generating Sun-like temperatures to recreate the processes that power our Earth-powering star have kept that technology at bay.

Well, we may be a lot closer to utilizing the power of fusion, thanks to the revolutionary thinking of HB11, a company that recently secured patents in the U.S., Japan, and China for just that kind of forward thinking technology. And if all goes according to plan, it could just change the world of electricity generation as we know it.

Neutral atoms and charged ions can be cooled down to extremely low temperatures (i.e., to microkelvins, 1 millionth of a degree above absolute zero) using laser techniques. At these low temperatures, the particles have often been found to behave in accordance with the laws of quantum mechanics.

Researchers have been conducting laser cooling experiments on atoms and ions for decades now. So far, however, no study had observed mixtures of both atoms and ions at extremely low temperatures.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam were the first to achieve this by placing an ion inside a cloud of lithium atoms pre-cooled to a few millionths of a kelvin. Their observations, published in Nature Physics, unveiled numerous effects that could have interesting implications for the development of new quantum technologies.

Physicists at Purdue University and the University of New South Wales have built a transistor from a single atom of phosphorous precisely placed on a bed of silicon, taking another step towards the holy grail of tech research: the quantum computer.

Revealed on Sunday in the academic journal Nature Nanotechnology, the research is part of a decade-long effort at the University of New South Wales to deliver a quantum computer – a machine that would use the seemingly magical properties of very small particles to instantly perform calculations beyond the scope of today’s classical computers.

Continue reading “Physicists Foretell Quantum Computer With Single-Atom Transistor” »

The bubbling, raucous quantum vacuum distorts the shape of every hydrogen atom in the universe, and it distorts antimatter “antihydrogen” too.

Plant-based cellulose nanocrystals have remarkable inherent properties, and when combined with water, a powerful adhesive is formed that competes in strength with Superglue, without the need for toxic solvents.