Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Mark Holley, a distinguished underwater archaeology professor at Northwestern Michigan University, recently unearthed a prehistoric structure in the bay that has drawn comparisons to England’s iconic Stonehenge. Located approximately 40 feet beneath Lake Michigan’s surface, this remarkable find is poised to transform our understanding of the region’s ancient history.

The submerged stones, although smaller than those at Stonehenge, appear to be meticulously arranged. These stones, varying in size from basketballs to compact cars, form a meandering line over a mile long. Among them, a particularly notable rock stands out. It measures three and a half to four feet tall and five feet wide, and features a carving of a mastodon—a testament to an era when these majestic creatures roamed the Earth.

The stones are estimated to be around 9,000 years old, predating Stonehenge by about 4,000 years. This period follows the end of the Ice Age and the formation of Grand Traverse Bay, when the lake bed had not yet been submerged.

Researchers have devised a passive thermal regulation mechanism using common materials that selectively manage radiant heat, providing a sustainable way to significantly improve building energy efficiency and comfort.

Engineers at Princeton and UCLA have developed a passive mechanism to cool buildings in the summer and warm them in the winter.

In an article recently published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, they report that by restricting radiant heat flows between buildings and their environment to specific wavelengths, coatings engineered from common materials can achieve energy savings and thermal comfort that goes beyond what traditional building envelopes can achieve.

Each Monday, I pick out North America’s celestial highlights for the week ahead (which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the northern hemisphere).

The night sky has a visiting comet flaunting its faint tail for stargazers this summer.

The comet 13P/Olbers will make its closest approach to Earth later this month, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The comet orbits the sun every 25,400 days. That’s about every 70 years – 69.54 to be exact. It was last be seen from Earth in 1956.

A research team has constructed a coherent superposition of quantum evolution with two opposite directions in a photonic system and confirmed its advantage in characterizing input-output indefiniteness. The study was published in Physical Review Letters.

The notion that time flows inexorably from the past to the future is deeply rooted in people’s mind. However, the laws of physics that govern the motion of objects in the microscopic world do not deliberately distinguish the direction of time.

To be more specific, the basic equations of motion of both classical and quantum mechanics are reversible, and changing the direction of the time coordinate system of a dynamical process (possibly along with the direction of some other parameters) still constitutes a valid evolution process.

Longtime readers know that I’ve made a bit of an effort to help people understand, and perhaps even grow to respect, the Everett or Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI). I’ve even written papers about it. It’s a controversial idea and far from firmly established, but it’s a serious one, and deserves serious discussion.

Tesla’s Megapack, with its ability to store and supply large amounts of renewable energy, has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry and contribute to a more sustainable future.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Continue reading “Revolutionizing Energy: Tesla’s Megapack Production Every 60 Minutes” »

It’s a crucial step forward in the quest for clean energy.

Mechanical systems are highly suitable for realizing applications such as quantum information processing, quantum sensing and bosonic quantum simulation. The effective use of these systems for these applications, however, relies on the ability to manipulate them in unique ways, specifically by ‘squeezing’ their states and introducing nonlinear effects in the quantum regime.

A research team at ETH Zurich led by Dr. Matteo Fadel recently introduced a new approach to realize quantum squeezing in a nonlinear mechanical oscillator. This approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could have interesting implications for the development of quantum metrology and sensing technologies.

“Initially, our goal was to prepare a mechanical squeezed state, namely a quantum state of motion with reduced quantum fluctuations along one phase-space direction,” Fadel told Phys.org. “Such states are important for quantum sensing and quantum simulation applications. They are one of the gates in the universal gate set for quantum computing with continuous-variable systems—meaning mechanical degrees of freedom, electromagnetic fields, etc., as opposed to qubits that are discrete-variable systems.”