Lifeboat Foundation

In what’s being hailed as an important first for chemistry, an international team of scientists has developed a new technology that can selectively rearrange atomic bonds within a single molecule. The breakthrough allows for an unprecedented level of control over chemical bonds within these structures, and could open up some exciting possibilities in what’s known as molecular machinery.

Molecules are made up of clusters of atoms, and are the product of the nature and arrangement of those atoms within. Where oxygen molecules we breathe feature the same repeating type of atom, sugar molecules are made of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

Scientists have been pursuing something called “selective chemistry” for some time, with the objective of forming exactly the type of chemical bonds between atoms that they want. Doing so could lead to the creation of complex molecules and devices that can be designed for specific tasks.

Using data collected over two decades ago, scientists from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, have compiled the first complete map of hydrogen abundances on the Moon’s surface. The map identifies two types of lunar materials containing enhanced hydrogen and corroborates previous ideas about lunar hydrogen and water, including findings that water likely played a role in the Moon’s original magma-ocean formation and solidification.

APL’s David Lawrence, Patrick Peplowski and Jack Wilson, along with Rick Elphic from NASA Ames Research Center, used orbital neutron data from the Lunar Prospector mission to build their map. The probe, which was deployed by NASA in 1998, orbited the Moon for a year and a half and sent back the first direct evidence of enhanced hydrogen at the lunar poles, before impacting the lunar surface.

When a star explodes, it releases cosmic rays, or high-energy protons and neutrons that move through space at nearly the speed of light. When those cosmic rays come into contact with the surface of a planet, or a moon, they break apart atoms located on those bodies, sending protons and neutrons flying. Scientists are able to identify an element and determine where and how much of it exists by studying the motion of those protons and neutrons.

Theoretical physicists at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have demonstrated how the coupling between intense lasers, the motion of electrons, and their spin influences the emission of light on the ultrafast timescale.

Electrons, which are present in all kinds of matter, are charged particles and therefore react to the application of light. When an intense light field hits a solid, electrons experience a force, called the Lorentz force, that drives them and induces some exquisite dynamics reflecting the properties of the material. This, in turn, results in the emission of light by the electrons at various wavelengths, a well-known phenomenon called high-harmonic generation.

Exactly how the electrons move under the influence of the light field depends on a complex mixture of properties of the solid, including its symmetries, topology, and band structure, as well as the nature of the light pulse. Additionally, electrons are like spinning tops. They have a propensity to rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise, a property called the “spin” of the electrons in quantum mechanics.

We all learn from early on that computers work with zeros and ones, also known as binary information. This approach has been so successful that computers now power everything from coffee machines to self-driving cars and it is hard to imagine a life without them.

Building on this success, today’s quantum computers are also designed with binary information processing in mind. “The building blocks of quantum computers, however, are more than just zeros and ones,” explains Martin Ringbauer, an experimental physicist from Innsbruck, Austria. “Restricting them to binary systems prevents these devices from living up to their true potential.”

The team led by Thomas Monz at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck, now succeeded in developing a quantum computer that can perform arbitrary calculations with so-called quantum digits (qudits), thereby unlocking more computational power with fewer quantum particles. Their study is published in Nature Physics.

“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.“
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Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Continue reading “I did not know that!” »

A team of astronomers using the Chinese Insight-HXMT x-ray telescope have made a direct measurement of the strongest magnetic field in the known universe. The magnetic field belongs to a magnetar currently in the process of cannibalizing an orbiting companion.

Magnetars are nasty, but thankfully rare. They are a special kind of neutron star that power up the strongest known magnetic fields.

Continue reading “A new Record for the Strongest Magnetic Field Seen in the Universe: 1.6 Billion Tesla” »

Scientists have been grappling with the strangeness of quantum entanglement for decades, and it’s almost as mysterious in 2022 as it was when Einstein famously dubbed the phenomenon “spooky action at a distance” in 1947. An experiment in Germany that set a new entanglement distance record — with atoms rather than photons — could help shed some light on this quirk of the universe.

Entanglement was initially proposed in the early 20th century as a consequence of quantum mechanics, but many scientists of the day, even Einstein himself, considered it to be impossible. However, many of the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics have been verified over the years, including entanglement. As we’ve seen in numerous experiments, it is possible for particles to be “entangled” such that properties like position, momentum, spin, and polarization can be shared between them. A change in one is immediately reflected in its twin.

Scientists believe entanglement could form the basis for future communication systems that are faster and more secure than what we use today — if you measure the state of one entangled partner, you automatically know the state of the other, and this could be used to transmit data. You just need to separate the entangled pair to make it useful, and researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) and Saarland University have pushed that range much farther in the new experiment.

Implications of the existence of a ‘conscious’ quantum particle.

I know this story is going to be weird in many ways but this is something worth thinking about. Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once stated.

“Imagine how much harder physics would be if electrons had feelings.”

Continue reading “What if Electrons had Feelings” »

The LHCb detector was originally designed to study a particle known as the beauty quark. But now researchers are also using the experiment to search for dark matter:

Researching subatomic particles is an involved process. It can take hundreds—if not thousands—of scientists and engineers to build an experiment, keep it up and running, and analyze the enormous amounts of data it collects. That means physicists are always on the lookout for ways to do more for free: to squeeze out as much physics as possible with the machinery that already exists. And that’s exactly what a handful of physicists have set out to do with the LHCb experiment at CERN.

The LHCb detector was originally designed to study a particle known as the beauty quark. “But as time has gone on, people have seen just how much more we can do with the detector,” says Daniel Johnson, an LHCb collaborator based at MIT.

Continue reading “LHCb ramps up the search for dark photons” »