Lifeboat Foundation

To take a picture, the best digital cameras on the market open their shutter for around around one four thousandths of a second.

To snapshot atomic activity, you’d need a shutter that clicks a lot faster.

Now scientists have come up with a way of achieving a shutter speed that’s a mere trillionth of a second, or 250 million times faster than those digital cameras. That makes it capable of capturing something very important in materials science: dynamic disorder.

A celebrated experiment in 1,801 showed that light passing through two thin slits interferes with itself, forming a characteristic striped pattern on the wall behind. Now, physicists have shown that a similar effect can arise with two slits in time rather than space: a single mirror that rapidly turns on and off causes interference in a laser pulse, making it change colour.

The result is reported on 3 April in Nature Phys ics¹. It adds a new twist to the classic double-slit experiment performed by physicist Thomas Young, which demonstrated the wavelike aspect of light, but also — in its many later reincarnations — that quantum objects ranging from photons to molecules have a dual nature of both particle and wave.

The rapid switching of the mirror — possibly taking just 1 femtosecond (one-quadrillionth of a second) — shows that certain materials can change their optical properties much faster than previously thought possible, says Andrea Alù, a physicist at the City University of New York. This could open new paths for building devices that handle information using light rather than electronic impulses.

It’s midway between a boat, plane and sports car.

Bootprints have not been left on the Moon since the early 1970s, but that will soon change. With NASA’s Artemis and China’s CLEP programs both scheduled to return humans to the Moon before 2030, the two superpowers are apparently in a “race” to the Lunar surface. But this time, who gets there “first” matters little. Instead, this race is about building a sustainable human presence on the Moon.

Here is how China’s and America’s approaches differ, and what it means for the future of spaceflight and human progress.

A comparison of the hardware China and the US are developing to return humans to the Moon.

The existence of aliens continues to elude scientists, including those that have dedicated their lives to finding definitive proof of extraterrestrial life. While a new study doesn’t point to the existence of aliens, some researchers have been left scratching their heads as to what the “coherent” signal being broadcast from an interstellar planet could be.

Published Monday in Nature Astronomy, scientists revealed they’ve discovered a repeating radio signal coming from the planet YZ Ceti b, located some 12 light-years from the edge of our solar system.

Alien life could thrive in terminator zones, the edges between the light and dark sides of planets that are tidally locked with their host stars.

A scaled version of the V-Wing made its first flight, showing that alternative designs could become long-distance aircraft of the future.

Looking ahead: Automatic Construction is in the process of building a concrete house for one customer in New York and has contracts signed with two others, according to Bell. It’s also inked a deal with a “large commercial contractor” for a structure.

It’s not clear how large those will be, but the prototypes the company has built so far are better described as tiny houses than starter homes — they might be large enough for one person, but they aren’t likely to accommodate a family.

Continue reading “Startup builds ‘inflatable’ concrete houses in just hours” »

The Zeva Zero is a one-person, disc-shaped eVTOL that can fly you at 160 mph and then fit into a conventional car parking space.