Lifeboat Foundation

China and the US; tensions are mounting and China’s new Quantum Satellite is aiding more fuel to the flames.

By: James Holbrooks (UndergroundReporter) Beijing — Only days after completing production of the largest amphibious aircraft ever built, China has just revealed plans to launch the world’s first satellite designed to conduct quantum experiments in space — a move that could one day lead to a highly secure “orbital internet.”

Assuming the initial satellite performs well, as many as 20 additional craft would follow in the effort to create a new category of communications network. Chinese researchers believe their work could ignite a space race as other nations move to refine the technology.

Continue reading “Warning Shots Fired: China Releases Video of Missile Launch, Amps Up Tensions with U.S” »

An elliptical light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” can rotate like an electron around a magnetic field.

Magnetism and rotation have a lot in common. The effect of a magnetic field on a moving charge, the Lorentz force, is formally equivalent to the fictitious force felt by a moving mass in a rotating reference frame, the Coriolis force. For this reason, atomic quantum gases under rotation can be used as quantum simulators of exotic magnetic phenomena for electrons, such as the fractional quantum Hall effect. But there is no direct equivalent of magnetism for photons, which are massless and chargeless. Now, Niclas Westerberg and co-workers at Heriot-Watt University, UK, have shown how to make synthetic magnetic fields for light [1]. They developed a theory that predicts how a light beam in a nonlinear optical medium pumped by “twisted light” will rotate as it propagates, just as an electron will whirl around in a magnetic field. More than that, the light will expand as it goes, demonstrating fluid-like behavior.

Lateral photonic integration of oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers enables their application in data communications and sensing.

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that operate at 850nm and are based on oxide-confined apertures are widely used in optical interconnects in data centers, supercomputers, wireless backbone networks, and consumer applications.¹ As the processor productivity in these applications increases, it is necessary to continuously improve performance and scale transmission speeds accordingly. In recent years, developers have produced a generation of devices capable of transmitting 40Gb/s at moderate current densities,^{2, 3} and they have recently demonstrated 54Gb/s non-return-to-zero transmission through 2.2km of multimode fiber.⁴ Now, 108Gb/s per wavelength transmission can be realized over 100–300m of multimode fiber through the use of advanced modulation formats: discrete multi-tone,⁵ multiCAP,⁶ and PAM4.

Continue reading “Oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers for single-mode operation” »

D-Wave making music.

A composer seeks to eavesdrop on the illogic at the heart of computing’s next wave.

Nice!

IBM scientists have developed a new lab-on-a-chip technology that can, for the first time, separate biological particles at the nanoscale and could help enable physicians to detect diseases such as cancer before symptoms appear.

As reported today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology (“Nanoscale Lateral Displacement Arrays for Separation of Exosomes and Colloids Down to 20nm”), the IBM team’s results show size-based separation of bioparticles down to 20 nanometers (nm) in diameter, a scale that gives access to important particles such as DNA, viruses and exosomes. Once separated, these particles can be analyzed by physicians to potentially reveal signs of disease even before patients experience any physical symptoms and when the outcome from treatment is most positive. Until now, the smallest bioparticle that could be separated by size with on-chip technologies was about 50 times or larger, for example, separation of circulating tumor cells from other biological components.

Continue reading “Lab-on-a-Chip breakthrough aims to help physicians detect cancer and diseases at the nanoscale” »

Researchers find that nanoparticles show promise for fighting tooth plaque — in rats, at least.

Could we see a day when 3D Printers replace convection ovens and microwaves in the kitchen?

Over the last few decades, a new wave of science has been infused into the world of food in the form of molecular gastronomy. By definition, food preparation and cooking involve physical and chemical changes, and molecular gastronomy simply uses scientific principles to take food in new technical and even artistic directions.

Continue reading “Your Dinner Is Ready To Be 3D Printed” »

The universe is 13.8 billion years old, while our planet formed just 4.5 billion years ago. Some scientists think this time gap means that life on other planets could be billions of years older than ours. However, new theoretical work suggests that present-day life is actually premature from a cosmic perspective.

“If you ask, ‘When is life most likely to emerge?’ you might naively say, ‘Now,’” says lead author Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But we find that the chance of life grows much higher in the distant future.”

Life as we know it first became possible about 30 million years after the Big Bang, when the first stars seeded the cosmos with the necessary elements like carbon and oxygen. Life will end 10 trillion years from now when the last stars fade away and die. Loeb and his colleagues considered the relative likelihood of life between those two boundaries.

Continue reading “Is Earthly life premature from a cosmic perspective?” »

China is planning to build an enormous particle accelerator twice the size and seven times as powerful as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, according to state media reports. According to China Daily, the new facility will be capable of producing millions of Higgs boson particles — a great deal more than the Large Hadron Collider which originally discovered the ‘God particle’ back in 2012.