Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—an atom-smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory—can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change—from negative to positive—in data that describe “higher order” characteristics of the distribution of protons produced in these collisions.

The findings, just published by RHIC’s STAR Collaboration in Physical Review Letters, will help physicists map out the conditions of temperature and density under which the exotic matter, known as a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), can exist and identify key features of the phases of nuclear matter.

Generating and studying QGP has been a central goal of research at RHIC. Since the collider began operating in 2000, a wide range of measurements have shown that the most energetic smashups of atomic nuclei—at 200 billion electron volts (GeV)— melt the boundaries of protons and neutrons to set free, for a fleeting instant, the quarks and gluons that make up ordinary nuclear particles.

Nuclear power is one of the safest, cleanest forms of energy — yet to most people, it might not feel that way. Why is that? Isabelle Boemeke, the world’s first nuclear energy influencer and creator of the social media persona Isodope, deftly debunks the major objections to nuclear power and explains her unconventional way of educating people about this clean energy source.

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Continue reading “Nuclear Power Is Our Best Hope to Ditch Fossil Fuels | Isabelle Boemeke | TED” »

The observation reveals high-energy X-rays that could help solve a mystery regarding the Sun’s corona.

As a new series of NASA observations show, there’s a lot more to sunlight than meets the eye.

This hidden light could help solve a mystery related to our host star’s incredibly hot outer atmosphere, the corona.

Continue reading “NASA image reveals hidden sunlight that may help solve solar mystery” »

Did you know Google’s artificial intelligence company DeepMind has been working to solve one of the biggest problems in nuclear fusion?

Check out the book (affiliate link):
https://amzn.to/3WnA5Uj.

Continue reading “How Google Solved Nuclear Fusion’s Big Problem” »

Quantum Mechanics is the science behind nuclear energy, smart phones, and particle collisions. Yet, almost a century after its discovery, there is still controversy over what the theory actually means. The problem is that its key element, the quantum-mechanical wave function describing atoms and subatomic particles, isn’t observable. As physics is an experimental science, physicists continue to argue over whether the wave function can be taken as real, or whether it is just a tool to make predictions about what can be measured—typically large, “classical” everyday objects.

The view of the antirealists, advocated by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and an overwhelming majority of physicists, has become the orthodox mainstream interpretation. For Bohr especially, reality was like a movie shown without a film or projector creating it: “There is no quantum world,” Bohr reportedly affirmed, suggesting an imaginary border between the realms of microscopic, “unreal” quantum physics and “real,” macroscopic objects—a boundary that has received serious blows by experiments ever since. Albert Einstein was a fierce critic of this airy philosophy, although he didn’t come up with an alternative theory himself.

For many years only a small number of outcasts, including Erwin Schrödinger and Hugh Everett populated the camp of the realists. This renegade view, however, is getting increasingly popular—and of course triggers the question of what this quantum reality really is. This is a question that has occupied me for many years, until I arrived at the conclusion that quantum reality, deep down at the most fundamental level, is an all-encompassing, unified whole: “The One.”

The company’s prototype is a smaller version of the nuclear reactor it’s hoping to send to the Moon by 2029.

Dramatic advances in quantum computing, smartphones that only need to be charged once a month, trains that levitate and move at superfast speeds. Technological leaps like these could revolutionize society, but they remain largely out of reach as long as superconductivity—the flow of electricity without resistance or energy waste—isn’t fully understood.

One of the major limitations for real-world applications of this technology is that the materials that make superconducting possible typically need to be at extremely cold temperatures to reach that level of electrical efficiency. To get around this limit, researchers need to build a clear picture of what different superconducting materials look like at the atomic scale as they transition through different states of matter to become superconductors.

Scholars in a Brown University lab, working with an international team of scientists, have moved a small step closer to cracking this mystery for a recently discovered family of superconducting Kagome metals. In a new study, they used an innovative new strategy combining nuclear magnetic resonance imaging and a quantum modeling theory to describe the microscopic structure of this superconductor at 103 degrees Kelvin, which is equivalent to about 275 degrees below 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

If your image of nuclear power is giant, cylindrical concrete cooling towers pouring out steam on a site that takes up hundreds of acres of land, soon there will be an alternative: tiny nuclear reactors that produce only one-hundredth the electricity and can even be delivered on a truck.

Small but meaningful amounts of electricity — nearly enough to run a small campus, a hospital or a military complex, for example — will pulse from a new generation of micronuclear reactors. Now, some universities are taking interest.

“What we see is these advanced reactor technologies having a real future in decarbonizing the energy landscape in the U.S. and around the world,” said Caleb Brooks, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

A UK firm has announced a world-first set of “super” magnets that can be used for testing nuclear fusion power plants.

Tokamak Energy said the Demo4 magnet has a magnetic field strength that is nearly a million times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field, making it capable of confining and controlling the extremely hot plasma created during the fusion process.

Nuclear fusion has been hailed as the “holy grail” of clean energy, with scientists working on the technology since the 1950s.