Lifeboat Foundation

Cyclists are supposed to wear helmets to protect them from any untoward accidents while riding through the city on their bicycles. While the helmet can protect from serious brain injury, other parts of the body can be exposed to both minor and serious injuries in case they encounter other vehicles and even pedestrians. It would be nice if there’s a sort of airbag that can shield them from injuries in case an accident happens and that said airbag will be portable enough for them to carry around.

Designer: In&Motion.

A new algorithm is probably not efficient enough to crack current encryption keys — but that’s no reason for complacency, researchers say.

Researchers in Brazil have achieved a quantum breakthrough by succeeding in the creation of a source of illumination that produces two separate entangled beams of light, according to new research.

The achievement was announced by a team of physicists with Brazil’s Laboratory for Coherent Manipulation of Atoms and Light (LMCAL), located at the University of São Paulo’s Physics Institute.

Quantum entanglement is among the most perplexing phenomena observed in modern physics. It involves particles that are linked in such a way that when changes affect the quantum state of one, the other to which it is “entangled” will also be affected. Strangely, such effects even occur over significant distances, a phenomenon first described as “spooky action at a distance” after its discussion in a landmark 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen.

When the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope entered low-Earth orbit in 2008, it opened our eyes to a whole new Universe of high-energy radiation.

One of its more curious discoveries was the Fermi Bubbles: giant, symmetrical blobs extending above and below the galactic plane, 25,000 light-years on each side from the Milky Way’s center, glowing in gamma-ray light – the highest energy wavelength ranges on the electromagnetic spectrum.

Then, in 2020, an X-ray telescope named eROSITA found another surprise: even bigger bubbles extending over 45,000 light-years on each side of the galactic plane, this time emitting less energetic X-rays.

A type of freshwater plankton has become the first organism seen thriving on a diet of viruses, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the US.

Viruses are often consumed incidentally by a range wide of organisms, and may even season the diets of certain marine protists. But to qualify as a true step in the food chain – described as virovory – viruses ought to contribute a significant amount of energy or nutrients to their consumer.

The microbe Halteria is a common genus of protist known to flit about as its hair-like cilia propel it through the water. Not only did laboratory samples of the ciliate consume chloroviruses added to its environment, the giant virus fueled Halteria’s growth and increased its population size.

SpaceX has released a video featuring a rocket’s-eye view of a recent orbital mission, all the way from launch to landing.

Everything you ever wanted to know about parallel universes, time, entropy, free will and more, explained by physicist Sean Carroll.

Up next, Michio Kaku: The Universe in a nutshell (Full Presentation) ► https://youtu.be/0NbBjNiw4tk.

Continue reading “The Universe in 90 minutes: Time, free will, God, & more | Sean Carroll” »

Taming rays of light and bending them to your will is tricky business. Light travels fast and getting a good chunk of it to stay in one place for a long time requires a lot of skillful coaxing. But the benefits of learning how to hold a moonbeam (or, more likely, a laser beam) in your hand, or on a convenient chip, are enormous. Trapping and controlling light on a chip can enable better lasers, sensors that help self-driving cars “see,” the creation of quantum-entangled pairs of photons that can be used for secure communication, and fundamental studies of the basic interactions between light and atoms—just to name a few.

Of all the moonbeam-holding chip technologies out there, two stand the tallest: the evocatively named whispering gallery mode microrings, which are easy to manufacture and can trap light of many colors very efficiently, and photonic crystals, which are much trickier to make and inject light into but are unrivaled in their ability to confine light of a particular color into a tiny space—resulting in a very large intensity of light for each confined photon.

Recently, a team of researchers at JQI struck upon a clever way to combine whispering gallery modes and photonic crystals in one easily manufacturable device. This hybrid device, which they call a microgear photonic crystal ring, can trap many colors of light while also capturing particular colors in tightly confined, high-intensity bundles. This unique combination of features opens a route to new applications, as well as exciting possibilities for manipulating light in novel ways for basic research.

Record-breaking floods in Australia’s northwest have resulted in many communities getting isolated, Australia’s weather forecaster said on Sunday (January 8). Severe weather system Ellie has created an emergency situation in Kimberly, an area in the state of Western Australia which is about the size of California.

The town of Fitzroy Crossing, a community of around 1,300 people, has been among the worst hit, with supplies having to be airlifted in due to flooded roads.

The Bureau of Meteorology said on Sunday that rain had eased as the ex-cyclone shifted eastwards to the Northern Territory, but warned that “record breaking major flooding” continued in the Kimberley.