Lifeboat Foundation

[p] Physics Today takes the spotlight off the laureates and instead focuses on the papers that prompted Nobel glory.[/p].

A fourth gravitational wave detector, this one in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, will join the global search for cosmic events that cause ripples in spacetime, beginning this December.

The Kamioka Gravitational-Wave Detector (KAGRA) is in its commissioning phase, according to a press release, and will join the two LIGO detectors in the United States well as the Virgo detector in Italy. The three facilities will share data, serving as independent verifiers of each other’s results.

According to condensed matter physics predictions, at a high enough pressure, hydrogen should dissociate and transform into an atomic metal. However, the exact pressure range at which this occurs has not yet been ascertained, and the process through which hydrogen becomes a metal is still somewhat unclear.

In a recent study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry demonstrated that at a pressure of 350–360 GPa and at temperatures below 200K, molecular hydrogen starts to conduct and becomes semimetallic. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, provides interesting new insight about the transition of hydrogen at high pressures, unveiling some of the properties it acquires.

“Typically, metallic hydrogen is considered to be atomic hydrogen—a crystal built from protons after dissociation of the molecules,” Mikhail Eremets, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, hydrogen can also transform into a metal in the molecular state—in this case, electronic bands of molecular hydrogen crystal broaden and eventually overlap so that the band gap closes, free electrons and holes appear—this is metallic state.”

Inspired by the unique and efficient swimming strategy of cephalopods, scientists developed an aquatic robot that mimics their form of propulsion.

These high-speed, squidlike robots are made of smart materials, which make them hard to detect—an advantage that has potential military reconnaissance and scientific applications—while maintaining a low environmental footprint.

Physicists Xiaobo Bi and Qiang Zhu used numerical simulations to illustrate the physical mechanisms and fluid mechanics of a squid’s swimming method, which uses intermittent bursts through pulsed jet propulsion. By using this form of locomotion, the new device can achieve impressive speeds, just like its animal inspiration. Bi and Zhu discuss their work in this week’s Physics of Fluids.

When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.

“Dark silicon” sounds like a magical artifact out of a fantasy novel. In reality, it’s one branch of a three-headed beast that foretells the end of advances in computation.

Ok—that might be too dramatic. But the looming problems in silicon-based computer chips are very real. Although computational power has exploded exponentially in the past five decades, we’ve begun hitting some intractable limits in further growth, both in terms of physics and economics.

Moore’s Law is dying. And chipmakers around the globe are asking, now what?

A WORMHOLE could allow space travel to the most distant regions of the universe in an instant and now a recent scientific paper has outlined a way to actually build on these anomalies of physics.

(VATICAN CITY) — Pope Francis on Friday warned tech company executives, diplomats and financiers that the race to create artificial intelligence and other forms of digital development pose the risk of increasing social inequality unless the work is accompanied by an ethical evaluation of the common good.

Francis addressed a Vatican conference that brought government envoys and Facebook and Google representatives together with philosophers, physicists and ethicists. A smattering of academics and Catholic bishops rounded out participants at “The Common Good in the Digital Age” conference.

The three-day gathering is the latest evidence of the Vatican wanting a place in the debate over the prospects and perils of artificial intelligence.

Are black holes bald or hairy? It all depends on the details of a fleeting gravitational wave.