Lifeboat Foundation

Laser labs sense gravitational waves from a black hole collision at least five billion light-years away.

Along with Richard Feynman’s varied scribblings and thoughts, his Nobel Prize, tambourine and book collection were also available at Sotheby’s.

One of the undisputed geniuses in the world of 20th-century physics was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and science enthusiasts will be delighted to learn that Feynman’s incandescent rough drafts of his thoughts and ideas headed to auction on Friday at Sotheby’s in New York, fetching a selling price of 4,922,625 USD.

As will be well-known to many people, Richard Feynman was a great popularizer of physics, and wrote entertaining and informative classics like S urely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, and What Do You Care What Other People Think? As The New York Times reminds us, Feynman also played a crucial role in determining what had caused the devastating loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

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Proxima b, our nearest neighboring exoplanet, is almost 25 trillion miles away. Even one of our fastest spaceships—the 31,600-mile-per-hour New Horizons—would take hundreds of thousands of years to get there. Assuming we can’t figure out how to warp space-time (seems unlikely, but fingers crossed), we’re still looking at a couple-hundred-year trip in the best-case scenario, which leads to the real problem: No human crew could survive the entire ride. Science-fiction writers have long floated so-called generation ships as a solution. Designers would outfit these interplanetary cruise vessels to support a community of adults and their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children’s children…until humanity finally reaches a new celestial shore. Here’s our best guess for what it would take to sow the seeds of an extrasolar species.

Career planning

Successive generations need to fill all the vital crew roles—such as medics and mechanics—which doesn’t leave much room for freedom of choice. A version of modern career tests would assign occupations based on aptitude, passions, and available jobs.

Continue reading “We could move to another planet with a spaceship like this” »

New research reveals why the “supermaterial” graphene has not transformed electronics as promised, and shows how to double its performance and finally harness its extraordinary potential.

Graphene is the strongest material ever tested. It’s also flexible, transparent and conducts heat and electricity 10 times better than copper.

After graphene research won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 it was hailed as a transformative material for flexible electronics, more powerful computer chips and solar panels, water filters and bio-sensors. But performance has been mixed and industry adoption slow.

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Physicists have created atomic clocks so precise that they can measure deformations in spacetime itself, according to new research.

We don’t all experience time passing equally—time passes more slowly closer to something massive’s gravitational pull, as famously theorized by Albert Einstein. And since gravity is typically interpreted as the way mass warps space itself, that means a precise-enough atomic clock could serve as a scientific tool for measuring how objects change the shape of their surrounding space.

All of these facts may make it sound as though scientists know a lot about Fast Radio Bursts. In reality, we don’t. For instance, though we know they’re not from our galaxy, we don’t know where exactly they come from. We don’t know what causes them. And we’re not sure whether they might be useful as cosmological standards to measure the large scale properties of our universe.

Dozens of theories about Fast Radio Bursts have been proposed. Some conform to standard physics. Others are more exotic, including cosmic strings – hypothetical, one-dimensional structures formed in the early universe – or even rather bizarre: one theory suggests that aliens are responsible.

Now, in an attempt to discover the truth about Fast Radio Bursts, we have created a catalogue that lists each theory, along with its pros and cons. Scientists from around the world can weigh in, and new data and discoveries will be added throughout the process.

Continue reading “How scientists are working together to solve one of the universe’s mysteries” »

When you shine a beam of light on your hand, you don’t feel much, except for a little bit of heat generated by the beam. When you shine that same light into a world that is measured on the nano- or micro scale, the light becomes a powerful manipulating tool that you can use to move objects around – trapped securely in the light.

Electrical engineers in the accelerator physics group at TU Darmstadt have developed a design for a laser-driven electron accelerator so small it could be produced on a silicon chip. It would be inexpensive and with multiple applications. The design, which has been published in Physical Review Letters, is now being realised as part of an international collaboration.