Lifeboat Foundation

LEDs are already pretty tiny, but they just got a whole lot smaller. Researchers at the University of Washington have built what they say are the “thinnest-possible LEDs” — tiny lights that measure just three atoms thick. “Such thin and foldable LEDs are critical for future portable and integrated electronic devices,” Xiaodong Xu, co-author of a paper on the research that was published over the weekend in Nature Nanotechnology, says in a statement. At three atoms thick, the researchers’ LEDs are said to be 10 to 20 times thinner than conventional LEDs, opening up a number of potential new uses for them.

The technology purifies the air through the photosynthesis of plants, removing greenhouse gases from the environment whilst generating breathable oxygen.

Ummmm… o„o.

A massive, underground “blob” of dripping continental crust might be triggering hundreds of mysterious earthquakes in the Hindu Kush mountains.

A new finding puts the half-life of xenon 124 close to 18 sextillion years.

That’s 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Existing theory predicts the isotope’s radioactive decay has a half-life that surpasses the age of the universe “by many orders of magnitude,” but no evidence of the process has appeared until now.

Continue reading “Half-life of xenon 124 is about 18 sextillion years” »

A googolplex is 10^{10^100}, where the exponents are solved from the right. The exponentiation symbol (^) means the number just to the left multiplied by the left number’s self the number just to the right number of times. If the left number is 10, that means 1 followed by the right number of zeros. That is 10^googol=10^{10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000}. So the answer to your question is a-googolplex-and-1=(10^{10^100})+1.

In the popular movie franchise “Back to the Future”, an eccentric scientist creates a time machine that runs on a flux capacitor.

Now a group of actual physicists from Australia and Switzerland have proposed a device which uses the quantum tunneling of magnetic flux around a capacitor, breaking time-reversal symmetry.

The research, published this week in Physical Review Letters, proposes a new generation of electronic circulators, which are devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

Continue reading “Physicists invent flux capacitor, break time-reversal symmetry” »

Read more

But there are still plenty of humans involved in preparing orders.

MIT researchers find unintended consequences of an idea to stimulate ocean phytoplankton growth in order to geoengineer a cooler atmosphere.