Lifeboat Foundation

The photos have stood the test of time: A spacesuit-clad Apollo astronaut stands proudly next to a red-white-and-blue American flag on the moon, his national trophy saying: “The United States was here.”

Unfortunately, the six flags planted on the lunar surface from 1969 through 1972 haven’t fared so well.

Images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2012 showed that at least five out six flags were still standing. However, scientists think decades’ worth of brilliant sunlight have bleached away their emblematic colors.

Is Jupiter the reason for life on Earth?

Quantum sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are a promising detection mode for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy due to their micron-scale detection volume and noninductive-based sample detection requirements. A challenge that exists is to sufficiently realize high spectral resolution coupled with concentration sensitivity for multidimensional NMR analysis of picolitre sample volumes. In a new report now on Science Advances, Janis Smits and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of High Technology Materials, Physics and Astronomy in the U.S. and Latvia addressed the challenge by spatially separating the polarization and detection phases of the experiment in a microfluidic platform.

They realized a spectral resolution of 0.65±0.05 Hz, an order-of-magnitude improvement compared with previous diamond NMR studies. Using the platform, they performed 2-D correlation spectroscopy of liquid analytes with an effective detection volume of ~40 picoliters. The research team used diamond quantum sensors as in-line microfluidic NMR detectors in a major step forward for applications in mass-limited chemical analysis and single-cell biology.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful and well-established technique for compositional, structural and functional analysis in a variety of scientific disciplines. In conventional NMR spectrometry the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is strongly dependent on the external field strength (B₀). As the spectral resolution increased, the B₀ increased as well, motivating the development of increasingly large and expensive superconducting magnets for improved resolution and SNR, resulting in a two-fold increase in field strength within the past 25 years.

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A NASA satellite has discovered a planet that could have the perfect conditions to host life.

The planet, which is about 31 light-years away from us, was picked up by the space agency’s TESS satellite and its conditions could support life, according to a bunch of scientists who have been researching it.

NASA has given the planet the name GJ 357 d, which isn’t very catchy, but researchers have given it the nickname ‘super-Earth’, due to the fact it has similar conditions to Earth but is much bigger.

Technicians at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab have finished polishing the front surface of a second 27.6-foot-wide (8.4 meters) GMT mirror, a precise and exacting process that took 10 months.

The phenomenon known as “tunneling” is one of the best-known predictions of quantum physics, because it so dramatically confounds our classical intuition for how objects ought to behave. If you create a narrow region of space that a particle would have to have a relatively high energy to enter, classical reasoning tells us that low-energy particles heading toward that region should reflect off the boundary with 100% probability. Instead, there is a tiny chance of finding those particles on the far side of the region, with no loss of energy. It’s as if they simply evaded the “barrier” region by making a “tunnel” through it.

It’s very important to note that this phenomenon is absolutely and unquestionably real, demonstrated in countless ways. The most dramatic of these is sunlight— the Sun wouldn’t be able to fuse hydrogen into helium without quantum tunneling— but it’s also got more down-to-earth technological applications. Tunneling serves as the basis for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, which uses the tunneling of electrons across a tiny gap between a sharp tip and a surface to produce maps of that surface that can readily resolve single atoms. It’s also essential for the Josephson effect, which is the basis of superconducting detectors of magnetic fields and some of the superconducting systems proposed for quantum computing.

So, there is absolutely no debate among physicists about whether quantum tunneling is a thing that happens. Physicists get a bit twitchy without something to argue over, though, and you don’t have to dig into tunneling (heh) very far to find a disputed question, namely “How long does quantum tunneling take?”

An international group of astronomers discovered the planet using NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) earlier this year in the constellation Hydra, about 31 light-years from Earth, according to a statement by NASA. (One light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles, or 10 trillion kilometers.)

FAIRY-SIZED astronauts will become humanity’s weapon of choice when it comes to exploring the universe.

That’s the shock claim made by one expert, who reckons by the end of the century we’ll be creating tiny people with wings to travel to new worlds for us.

Dr Ian Pearson, a “futurologist” – someone who specialises in predicting future tech trends – says we’ll soon be able to genetically engineer folk of all shapes and sizes.