Lifeboat Foundation

The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams opens its doors to experiments that will study the formation of heavy elements in the Universe and provide critical tests of nuclear theories.

The nuclear physics community is hailing the kickoff of a long-awaited facility for producing beams of radioactive isotopes, with a cohort of users gearing up for the first experiments. The Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University opens its doors to experimenters this week. FRIB is expected to deliver the widest range of rare isotopes of any existing facility, including many never-before-synthesized isotopes. The facility will also allow researchers to control the energies of the isotope beams so that they match those relevant to nuclear processes in stars and supernovae.

Rare isotopes get their name from their scarcity—these unstable nuclei decay radioactively and thus cannot be found naturally on Earth. But making sizable quantities of these elements in a lab will allow scientists to tackle important open problems in physics. Current nuclear theories, for instance, can’t describe many nuclei, and rare isotopes provide extreme cases on which to test why such theories fail. Rare isotopes are also relevant to the cosmic nucleosynthesis of heavy elements, a process for which there isn’t yet a satisfactory explanation. On the applied side, radioactive isotopes can be useful for medical imaging, cancer treatment, and other industrial applications.

Can humanity last another 400,000 years? We might have to if we want to talk to another technological civilization.

If there are so many galaxies, stars, and planets, where are all the aliens, and why haven’t we heard from them? Those are the simple questions at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. In a new paper, a pair of researchers ask the next obvious question: how long will we have to survive to hear from another alien civilization?

Their answer? 400,000 years.

Continue reading “Humanity Will Need to Survive About 400,000 Years if We Want any Chance of Hearing From an Alien Civilization” »

Here’s how over 300 astronomers captured the dazzling first image of Sagittarius A*, and why it matters.

Our team was part of the global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which has used observations from a worldwide network of eight radio telescopes on our planet — collectively forming a single, Earth-sized virtual telescope — to take the stunning image. The breakthrough follows the collaboration’s 2019 release of the first-ever image of a black hole, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy.

Black holes: Looking into darkness

Continue reading “The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy proves Einstein right” »

A “forever battery” is much smaller and more energy-dense than lithium-ion. They’ll change the world and unlock a trillion-dollar revolution.

In this week’s episode, Aaron and I discuss what could be the “holy grail” of energy: the solid-state — or forever battery. Obviously, lithium-ion cells are the status quo of today. And they power pretty much everything, like your smartphone, laptop and electric vehicle.

Continue reading “Forever Battery: QuantumScape’s Holy Grail of Energy” »

Summary: Supplementing a diet with Ascidiacea, or sea squirts, reversed some of the main signs of aging in mouse models.

Source: Xi’an jiaotong-Liverpool University.

If you have ever looked in the mirror and seen graying hair and wrinkles or forgotten the name of a close friend, you’d be forgiven for wishing for a pill that could slow or even reverse the effects of aging.

With Earth’s natural resources running out, people are looking to mineral-rich asteroids to meet demand.

When stars like our Sun run out of fuel, they contract to form white dwarfs. Such dead stars can sometimes flare back to life in a super-hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation. A research team from several German institutes including Tübingen University and led by Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has now observed such an explosion of X-ray light for the very first time.

“It was to some extent a fortunate coincidence, really,” explains Ole König from the Astronomical Institute at FAU in the Dr. Karl Remeis observatory in Bamberg, who has published an article about this observation in the reputable journal Nature, together with Prof. Dr. Jörn Wilms and a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the University of Tübingen, the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam. “These X-ray flashes last only a few hours and are almost impossible to predict, but the observational instrument must be pointed directly at the explosion at exactly the right time,” explains the astrophysicist.

“These so-called novae do happen all the time but detecting them during the very first moments when most of the X-ray emission is produced is really hard.” —

Gene editing reverses brain genetic reprogramming caused by adolescent binge drinking.

Gene editing may be a potential treatment for anxiety and alcohol use disorder in adults who were exposed to binge drinking in their adolescence, according to the findings of an animal study published on May 4, 2022, in the journal Science Advances.

The study was issued by researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) who have been studying the effects of early-life binge drinking on health later in life.