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Category: physics – Page 184

Circa 2016

Scientists and engineers since the 1940s have been toying with the idea of building self-replicating machines, or von Neumann machines, named for John von Neumann. With recent advances in 3D printing (including in zero gravity) and machine learning AI, it seems like self-replicating machines are much more feasible today. In the 21st century, a tantalizing possibility for this technology has emerged: sending a space probe out to a different star system, having it mine resources to make a copy of itself, and then launching that one to yet another star system, and on and on and on.

As a wild new episode of PBS’s YouTube series Space Time suggests, if we could send a von Neumann probe to another star system—likely Alpha Centauri, the closest to us at about 4.4 light years away—then that autonomous spaceship could land on a rocky planet, asteroid, or moon and start building a factory. (Of course, it’d probably need a nuclear fusion drive, something we still need to develop.)

That factory of autonomous machines could then construct solar panels, strip mine the world for resources, extract fuels from planetary atmospheres, build smaller probes to explore the system, and eventually build a copy of the entire von Neumann spacecraft to send off to a new star system and repeat the process. It has even been suggested that such self-replicating machines could build a Dyson sphere to harness energy from a star or terraform a planet for the eventual arrival of humans.

Continue reading “Could We Explore the Entire Galaxy With Self-Replicating Robots?” | >

According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein’s theory of special relativity.

It’s called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1,934 and we have very good reason to believe it would work.

But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don’t have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser.

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This axion insulating state was realized, Bansil says, by combining certain metals and observing their magnetoelectric response. In this case, researchers used a solid state chip composed of manganese bismuth telluride, which were adhered together in two-dimensional layers, to measure the resulting electric and magnetic properties.

Researchers note that such a finding has implications for a range of technologies, including sensors, switches, computers, and memory storage devices, among many others. The “storage, transportation, and manipulation of magnetic data could become much faster, more robust, and energy-efficient” if scientists can integrate these new topological materials into future devices, the researchers write.

“It’s like discovering a new element,” Bansil says. “And we know there’s going to be all sorts of interesting applications for this.”

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Physicists of the Technische Universität Dresden introduce the first implementation of a complementary vertical organic transistor technology, which is able to operate at low voltage, with adjustable inverter properties, and a fall and rise time demonstrated in inverter and ring-oscillator circuits of less than 10 nanoseconds, respectively. With this new technology they are just a stone’s throw away from the commercialization of efficient, flexible and printable electronics of the future. Their groundbreaking findings are published in the renowned journal Nature Electronics.

Poor performance is still impeding the commercialization of flexible and printable electronics. Hence, the development of low-voltage, high-gain, and high-frequency complementary circuits is seen as one of the most important targets of research. High-frequency logic circuits, such as inverter circuits and oscillators with low power consumption and fast response time, are the essential building blocks for large-area, low power-consumption, flexible and printable electronics of the future. The research group “Organic Devices and Systems” (ODS) at the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP) at TU Dresden headed by Dr. Hans Kleemann is working on the development of novel organic materials and devices for high performance, flexible and possibly even biocompatible electronics and optoelectronics. Increasing the performance of organic circuits is one of the key challenges in their research. It was only some month ago, when Ph.D.

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Astronomers have seen light from BEHIND a black hole for the first time. I explained the discovery and results to my editor, Levi. Congrats to D. Wilkins and the astronomy team!

Tap dat Patreon → https://www.patreon.com/physicsgirl.

Special thank you to our X-Ray tier patrons: Carlos Patricio, David Cichowski, Eddie Sabbah, Fabrice Eap, Gil Chesterton, Isabel Herstek, Margaux Lopez, Matt Kaminski, Michael Schneider, Patrick Olson, Tommy Joseph, Vikram Bhat, Vincent Argiro, wc993219.

http://physicsgirl.org/

Continue reading “What the NEW black hole discovery tells us!” | >

Astronomers have developed the most realistic model to date of planet formation in binary star systems.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, have shown how exoplanets in binary star systems – such as the ‘Tatooine’ planets spotted by NASA

Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

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Scientists have published a new, detailed radio image of the Andromeda galaxy—the Milky Way’s sister galaxy—which will allow them to identify and study the regions of Andromeda where new stars are born.

The study—which is the first to create a radio image of Andromeda at the of 6.6 GHz—was led by University of British Columbia physicist Sofia Fatigoni, with colleagues at Sapienza University of Rome and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics. It was published online in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“This image will allow us to study the structure of Andromeda and its content in more detail than has ever been possible,” said Fatigoni, a Ph.D. student in the department of physics and astronomy at UBC. “Understanding the nature of physical processes that take place inside Andromeda allows us to understand what happens in our own galaxy more clearly—as if we were looking at ourselves from the outside.”

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