Lifeboat Foundation

While driven by the desire to pursue curiosity, fundamental investigations are the crucial first step to innovation.

When scientists announced their discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, it made headlines all over the world. The existence of these invisible ripples in space-time had finally been confirmed.

It was a momentous feat in basic research, the curiosity-driven search for fundamental knowledge about the universe and the elements within it. Basic (or “blue-sky”) research is distinct from applied research, which is targeted toward developing or advancing technologies to solve a specific problem or to create a new product.

Continue reading “How blue-sky research shapes the future” »

Lagrangian Mechanics is the basis of modern Physics. In this article, we’ll discuss various Lagrangians and show how waves could explain everything.

Potential applications include pressure-monitoring bandages, shade-shifting fabrics.

The bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings or beetle shells don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured—a naturally occurring example of what physicists call photonic crystals. Scientists can make their own structural colored materials in the lab, but it can be challenging to scale up the process for commercial applications without sacrificing optical precision.

Overall, the experiment represents steps forward in understanding fundamental physics and applies to much more macroscale phenomena.

Page. Do not worry you can find what you are looking for with our enhanced site search or simply visit the home page and start from there.

Lensing of the cosmic microwave background indicates 12-billion-year-old galaxies had dark matter.

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Energetic Materials Center and Purdue University Materials Engineering Department have used simulations performed on the LLNL supercomputer Quartz to uncover a general mechanism that accelerates chemistry in detonating explosives critical to managing the nation’s nuclear stockpile. Their research is featured in the July 15 issue of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

Insensitive high explosives based on TATB (1,3,5-triamino-2,4,6-trinitrobenzene) offer enhanced safety properties over more conventional explosives, but physical explanations for these safety characteristics are not clear. Explosive initiation is understood to arise from hotspots that are formed when a shockwave interacts with microstructural defects such as pores. Ultrafast compression of pores leads to an intense localized spike in temperature, which accelerates chemical reactions needed to initiate burning and ultimately detonation. Engineering models for insensitive high explosives—used to assess safety and performance—are based on the hotspot concept but have difficulty in describing a wide range of conditions, indicating missing physics in those models.

Using large-scale atomically resolved reactive molecular dynamics supercomputer simulations, the team aimed to directly compute how hotspots form and grow to better understand what causes them to react.

Dwarf galaxies are small galaxies composed of a few billion stars. They are challenging to detect due to their low luminosity, low mass, and small size. However, it remains elusive how these dwarf and giant galaxies assemble their stars and evolve into modern-day galaxies.

India’s first dedicated multi-wavelength space observatory, AstroSat, cracked this mystery. A team of scientists using AstroSat shows how the star-forming complexes in the outskirts of a dwarf galaxy migrate towards the central region and contribute to its growth in mass and luminosity.

The team includes astronomers from India, the USA, and France. Professor Kanak Saha at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune, conceived this study. Mr. Anshuman Borgohain is the lead author of the paper.

What is dark matter? Does it even exist, or do we just need an adjustment to our theory of gravity?

What is dark matter? It has never been observed, yet scientists estimate that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. The short answer is that no one knows what dark matter is. More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin offered it as an explanation for the velocity of stars in our own galaxy. Decades later, Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark noted that the universe must contain much more matter than we can observe. Scientists since the 1960s and ’70s have been trying to figure out what this mysterious substance is, using ever-more complicated technology. However, a growing number of physicists suspect that the answer may be that there is no such thing as dark matter at all.

Scientists can observe far-away matter in a number of ways. Equipment such as the famous Hubble telescope measures visible light while other technology, such as radio telescopes, measures non-visible phenomena. Scientists often spend years gathering data and then proceed to analyze it to make the most sense of what they are seeing.