Lifeboat Foundation

Could physics help people with epilepsy? That’s the question tackled by Louis Nemzer, a physicist at Nova Southeastern University, in the September 2019 issue of Physics World magazine, which is out now in print and digital formats.

He thinks that machine learning and real-time monitoring of the brain could give people with epilepsy live information about how much at risk they are of an imminent seizure – and is even developing a smartphone app to help them in daily life.

Elsewhere in the issue, Peter Martin and Tom Scott from the University of Bristol describe how they’ve used drones to map radiation levels at the Chernobyl plant, which you can also read on this website from 2 September, while Kate Brown from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examines the health impact of Chernobyl fall-out.

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe.

The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed since the Big Bang. However, the two best methods used to measure the Hubble constant do not agree, suggesting our understanding of the structure and history of the universe – called the ‘standard cosmological model’ – may be wrong.

There was, writes Dennis Overbye in New York Times Science, a disturbance in the Force: “Long, long ago, when the universe was only about 100,000 years old — a buzzing, expanding mass of particles and radiation — a strange new energy field switched on. That energy suffused space with a kind of cosmic antigravity, delivering a not-so-gentle boost to the expansion of the universe.

The quantum internet promises absolutely tap-proof communication and powerful distributed sensor networks for new science and technology. However, because quantum information cannot be copied, it is not possible to send this information over a classical network. Quantum information must be transmitted by quantum particles, and special interfaces are required for this. The Innsbruck-based experimental physicist Ben Lanyon, who was awarded the Austrian START Prize in 2015 for his research, is investigating these important intersections of a future quantum Internet.

Now his team at the Department of Experimental Physics at the University of Innsbruck and at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences has achieved a record for the transfer of quantum entanglement between matter and light. For the first time, a distance of 50 kilometers was covered using fiber optic cables. “This is two orders of magnitude further than was previously possible and is a practical distance to start building inter-city quantum networks,” says Ben Lanyon.

Carbon isn’t just the stuff life is made of—it’s also the stuff our future is being built on.

Carbon—a versatile element that frequently trades off its electrons to create various forms of itself—has been gaining an exciting reputation in tech thanks to the successful exfoliation of graphene, a sheet of carbon that’s just one atom thick and has remarkable chemical properties.

But carbon nanotubes, a sort of cousin to graphene, has been quietly staking out its own place in the world of materials science.

In a study published in Scientific Reports, a group of researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil describes an important theoretical finding that may contribute to the development of quantum computing and spintronics (spin electronics), an emerging technology that uses electron spin or angular momentum rather than electron charge to build faster, more efficient devices.

The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP. Its principal investigator was Antonio Carlos Seridonio, a professor in UNESP’s Department of Physics and Chemistry at Ilha Solteira, São Paulo State. His graduate students Yuri Marques, Willian Mizobata and Renan Oliveira also participated.

The researchers observed that molecules with the capacity to encode information are produced in systems called Weyl semimetals when time-reversal symmetry is broken.

Nobody can say for sure. Hundreds of years ago, atoms were thought to be the smallest particles in the universe. But since then, scientists like Indu invented tools such as particle detectors, accelerators, and colliders that can study them in great detail. Thanks to these tools, they have discovered a whole set of elementary particles, which are the smallest particles we know about today.

Quarks and gluons are two such elementary particles that combine to form protons and neutrons. These, along with electrons, make up atoms. Atoms constitute most of the matter that we know about—from trees and stones to animals and birds. But Indu was amazed to learn that there is a whole set of particles that exist but are not part of atoms at all. One such elementary particle is the neutrino, Indu’s absolute favourite! Neutrinos are everywhere. They whiz across the universe—from the sun and from elsewhere in outer space. Many of them reach us here on earth too. So, how common are they?

Tell you what. Snap your fingers right now. Done? In the amount of time it took you to do this, billions of neutrinos have passed through your thumb! Neutrinos may be tiny, but they are very important because our universe is full of them. Knowing the mass of a neutrino will help Indu understand the rate at which the universe is expanding.

General Motors is the latest automaker reported to be working on solid-state lithium batteries, thanks to a $2 million grant from Uncle Sam.

The money is part of a larger grant to develop more fuel-efficient powertrains, CNET reported. The company is expected to use the rest of the money to develop a lighter-weight, more efficient engine for medium duty trucks, perhaps to replace the company’s 6.2-liter V-8.

Continue reading “Kilopower: NASA’s Offworld Nuclear Reactor” »

Scientists at MIT built a 16-bit microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes and even ran a program on it, a new paper reports.

Silicon-based computer processors seem to be approaching a limit to how small they can be scaled, so researchers are looking for other materials that might make for useful processors. It appears that transistors made from tubes of rolled-up, single-atom-thick sheets of carbon, called carbon nanotubes, could one day have more computational power while requiring less energy than silicon.

“This work is particularly exciting because carbon nanotubes are one of the most promising supplements in the future of beyond-silicon computers,” Max Shulaker, the study’s corresponding author and assistant professor at MIT, told Gizmodo.

Researchers have successfully created a model of the Universe using artificial intelligence, reports a new study.

Researchers seek to understand our Universe by making model predictions to match observations. Historically, they have been able to model simple or highly simplified physical systems, jokingly dubbed the “spherical cows,” with pencils and paper. Later, the arrival of computers enabled them to model complex phenomena with numerical simulations. For example, researchers have programmed supercomputers to simulate the motion of billions of particles through billions of years of cosmic time, a procedure known as the N-body simulations, in order to study how the Universe evolved to what we observe today.

“Now with machine learning, we have developed the first neural network model of the Universe, and demonstrated there’s a third route to making predictions, one that combines the merits of both analytic calculation and numerical simulation,” said Yin Li, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo, and jointly the University of California, Berkeley.