Lifeboat Foundation

Facebook VR leader — and Doom creator — John Carmack has quit his advisory position at the company now known as Meta, and took to the social network to unsparingly explain his departure.

In a Facebook post, Carmack publicly shared his resignation email, which he said he decided to post after it had been partially leaked to the press.

“This is the end of my decade in VR,” the gaming pioneer’s note began. “I have mixed feelings.”

On Dec. 19, 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H. “Jack” Schmitt, the first trained geologist to travel to the Moon, successfully ended their 13-day Moon landing mission with a splashdown in their Command Module (CM) America in the Pacific Ocean.

A few weeks ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) quietly unveiled a new high-speed missile program called Gambit. The program is meant to leverage a novel method of propulsion that could have far-reaching implications not just in terms of weapons development, but for high-speed aircraft and even in how the Navy’s warships are powered.

This propulsion system, known as a rotation detonation engine (RDE), has the potential to be lighter than existing jet engines while offering a significant boost in power output, range, and fuel efficiency.

Continue reading “The game-changing tech in DARPA’s new missile” »

Two weeks before his death, famed scientist Stephen Hawking published a research article predicting parallel universes and along with the end of our own.

Hawking and co-author Thomas Hertog published their results in “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation,” outlining how scientists may also be able to discover other universes using spaceships. According to Hertog, Hawking completed the work on his deathbed, leaving a legacy worthy of the Nobel Prize.

“He has often been nominated for the Nobel and should have won it. Now he never can,” he told the Sunday Times.

For decades, physicists have been hunting for a quantum-gravity model that would unify quantum physics, the laws that govern the very small, and gravity. One major obstacle has been the difficulty in testing the predictions of candidate models experimentally. But some of the models predict an effect that can be probed in the lab: a very small violation of a fundamental quantum tenet called the Pauli exclusion principle, which determines, for instance, how electrons are arranged in atoms.

A project carried out at the INFN underground laboratories under the Gran Sasso mountains in Italy, has been searching for signs of radiation produced by such a violation in the form of atomic transitions forbidden by the Pauli exclusion principle.

In two papers appearing in the journals Physical Review Letters (published on September 19, 2022) and Physical Review D (accepted for publication on December 7, 2022) the team reports that no evidence of violation has been found, thus far, ruling out some quantum-gravity models.

Quantum telepathy, laser-based time crystals, a glow from empty space and an “unreal” universe—these are the most awesome (and awfully hard to understand) results from the subatomic realm we encountered in 2022.

Weekly science podcast produced by the SGU Productions llc. Also provides blogs, forums, videos and resources.

A team of scientists has uncovered the physical principles—a series of forces and hydrodynamic flows—that help ensure the proper functioning of life’s blueprint. Its discovery provides new insights into the genome while potentially offering a new means to spot genomic aberrations linked to developmental disorders and human diseases.

“The way in which the genome is organized and packed inside the nucleus directly affects its biological function, yet the physical principles behind this organization are far from understood,” explains Alexandra Zidovska, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Physics and an author of the paper, which appears in the journal Physical Review X (PRX). “Our results provide fundamental insights into the biophysical origins of the organization of the genome inside the cell nucleus.”

Continue reading “Stresses and hydrodynamics: Scientists uncover new organizing principles of the genome” »

Our universe is so vast that it appears impossible for anything else to exist. Experts are beginning to suspect that our universe might exist inside a fourth-dimensional black hole.

Our cosmos began as a singularity, a point in space that was endlessly hot and dense. According to researchers at CERN such as James Beecham, black holes in our universe may have the same characteristics as those described by the scientific community.