Lifeboat Foundation

Fyodor R.

Scientists recently identified the oldest material on Earth: stardust that’s 7 billion years old, tucked away in a massive, rocky meteorite that struck our planet half a century ago.

🏺Stardust

Continue reading “🏺A while before the Sun was born” »

Circa 2002

This paper proposes a new concept for generating controlled, high-flux pulses of neutrinos. Laser-induced generation of relativistic protons, followed by pion production and decay, provides the neutrino source. By conservative estimate, the source will yield nanosecond-range pulses of muon–neutrinos, with fluxes of ~10¹⁹ ν_μ s⁻¹ sr⁻¹ and energies of ~20 MeV or higher. Concept feasibility depends upon further progress in high-intensity lasers; the process assumes a driving laser with pulse energy ~8 kJ, providing an irradiance of ~9 × 10²² W cm⁻². The study of the KARMEN time anomaly and neutrino oscillations would be the possible applications of the source.

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As others have pointed out, voxel-based games have been around for a long time; a recent example is the whimsical “3D Dot Game Hero” for PS3, in which they use the low-res nature of the voxel world as a fun design element.

Voxel-based approaches have huge advantages (“infinite” detail, background details that are deformable at the pixel level, simpler simulation of particle-based phenomena like flowing water, etc.) but they’ll only win once computing power reaches an important crossover point. That point is where rendering an organic world a voxel at a time looks better than rendering zillions of polygons to approximate an organic world. Furthermore, much of the effort that’s gone into visually simulating real-world phenomena (read the last 30 years of Siggraph conference proceedings) will mostly have to be reapplied to voxel rendering. Simply put: lighting, caustics, organic elements like human faces and hair, etc. will have to be “figured out all over again” for the new era of voxel engines. It will therefore likely take a while for voxel approaches to produce results that look as good, even once the crossover point of level of detail is reached.

I don’t mean to take anything away from the hard and impressive coding work this team has done, but if they had more academic background, they’d know that much of what they’ve “pioneered” has been studied in tremendous detail for two decades. Hanan Samet’s treatise on the subject tells you absolutely everything you need to know, and more: (http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Multidimensional-Structure…sr=8-1) and even goes into detail about the application of these spatial data structures to other areas like machine learning. Ultimately, Samet’s book is all about the “curse of dimensionality” and how (and how much) data structures can help address it.

Essentially beyond this is a higgs boson reactor essentially a universe of power in a jar.

Scientists have longed to create the perfect energy source. Ideally, that source would eventually replace greenhouse gas-spewing fossil fuels, power cars, boats, and planes, and send spacecraft to remote parts of the universe. So far, nuclear fusion energy has seemed like the most likely option to help us reach those goals.

Continue reading “Navy Files Patent for Compact Fusion Reactor” »

Circa 2015

Spaceships in movies and TV shows routinely use tractor beams to tow other vessels or keep them in place. Physicists have been hard at work trying take this technology from science fiction to reality. Significant process has recently been made by a team who have developed a laser tractor beam able to attract and repel particles about 100 times further than has been previously achieved. The lead author of the paper, published in Nature Photonics, is Vladlen Shvedov at Australian National University in Canberra.

Other recent tractor beams have used acoustics or water, but this one uses a single laser beam to control tiny particles about 0.2 millimeters in diameter. The tractor beam was able to manipulate the particles from a distance of 20 centimeters, shattering previous records. Despite this incredible distance, the researchers claim it is still on the short end of what is possible for this tractor beam technique.

Continue reading “Physicists Develop Reversible Laser Tractor Beam Functional Over Long Distances” »

Devices made with 2D semiconductors might start to appear sooner than you expected.

If there’s one thing about Moore’s Law that’s obvious to anyone, it’s that transistors have been made smaller and smaller as the years went on. Scientists and engineers have taken that trend to an almost absurd limit during the past decade, creating devices that are made of one-atom-thick layers of material.

The most famous of these materials is, of course, graphene, a hexagonal honeycomb-shaped sheet of carbon with outstanding conductivity for both heat and electricity, odd optical abilities, and incredible mechanical strength. But as a substance with which to make transistors, graphene hasn’t really delivered. With no natural bandgap—the property that makes a semiconductor a semiconductor—it’s just not built for the job.

Instead, scientists and engineers have been exploring the universe of transition metal dichalcogenides, which all have the chemical formula MX2. These are made up of one of more than a dozen transition metals (M) along with one of the three chalcogenides (X): sulfur, selenium, or tellurium. Tungsten disulfide, molybdenum diselenide, and a few others can be made in single-atom layers that (unlike graphene) are natural semiconductors. These materials offer the enticing prospect that we will be able to scale down transistors all the way to atom-thin components long after today’s silicon technology has run its course.

Continue reading “Coming Soon to a Processor Near You: Atom-Thick Transistors
” »

Essentially neutrino lasers could take out missiles and also hack missiles or nukes rendering them inert in defense practices.

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Continue reading “Keeping Track of the World’s Highest-Intensity Neutrino Beam” »

Scientists are searching for a ghostly neutrino particle that acts as its own antiparticle. If they find it, the discovery could resolve a cosmic conundrum: Why does matter exist at all?

Circa 2012

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever or a device that opens new dimensions into quantum phenomena such as emergence and entanglement.

Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.

Continue reading “A Clock that Will Last Forever” »