Lifeboat Foundation

Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian credits mentorship with helping him establish a path through nuclear physics.

Mentorship has played a central role in the twists and turns of Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian’s life.

“Verification of nuclear disarmament is very important, because a treaty without verification is worse than no treaty at all,” Danagoulian says, citing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that was proposed in the 1950s but not fully adopted until 1996, in part because scientists lacked the technology to reliably differentiate underground testing from seismic events. has played a central role in the twists and turns of Associate Professor Areg Danagoulian’s life.

The team was able to maintain this state of superposition among hundreds of vibrating pairs of fermions. In so doing, they achieved a new “quantum register,” or system of qubits, that appears to be robust over relatively long periods of time. The discovery, published today in the journal Nature, demonstrates that such wobbly qubits could be a promising foundation for future quantum computers.

New qubits stay in “superposition” for up to 10 seconds, and could make a promising foundation for quantum computers.

Continue reading “Vibrating atoms make robust qubits, physicists find” »

A team of researchers from the University of Arizona has proposed a “Lunar Ark” for preserving samples of 6.7 million Earth species in the event of a global crisis.

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Continue reading “‘LUNAR ARK’: Scientists plan to build Noah’s Ark on the Moon to protect Earth’s biodiversity” »

It blinks too fast to be a supernova and too slow to be a pulsar. So what in the cosmos is it?

Today, the ECoG grids most commonly used in surgeries typically have between 16 and 64 sensors, although research grade grids with up to 256 sensors can be custom made. The device created at UCSD is therefore a major advance in the field. It could improve neurosurgeons’ ability to remove as much of a brain tumour as possible while minimising damage to healthy tissue. In the case of epilepsy, the higher resolution could enable a surgeon to precisely identify the brain regions where seizures are originating, so that these can be removed without touching nearby regions not involved in seizure initiation. In this way, these high-resolution grids may enhance preservation of normal, functioning brain tissue.

ECoG grids with sensors in the thousands could also help in uncovering a deeper understanding of how the brain functions. Basic science advances, in turn, could lead to improved treatments grounded in enhanced understanding of brain function.

The team at UCSD – who collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital and Oregon Health & Science University – achieved their breakthrough by packing individual sensors significantly closer to each other, while avoiding problematic interference between nearby sensors. The ECoG grids already in clinical use typically have sensors that are spaced one centimetre apart. But the new 1,024-sensor device has sensors just one millimetre apart, with a total grid area measuring three by three centimetres and is scalable to 2,048 sensors.

NASA’s TESS exoplanet hunter is truly prolific.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has identified more than 5,000 potential alien worlds.

On the largest cosmic scales, planet Earth appears to be anything but special. Like hundreds of billions of other planets in our galaxy, we orbit our parent star; like hundreds of billions of solar systems, we revolve around the galaxy; like the majority of galaxies in the Universe, we’re bound together in either a group or cluster of galaxies. And, like most galactic groups and clusters, we’re a small part of a larger structure containing over 100,000 galaxies: a supercluster. Ours is named Laniakea: the Hawaiian word for “immense heaven.”

Superclusters have been found and charted throughout our observable Universe, where they’re more than 10 times as rich as the largest known clusters of galaxies. Unfortunately, owing to the presence of dark energy in the Universe, these superclusters ⁠— including our own ⁠— are only apparent structures. In reality, they’re mere phantasms, in the process of dissolving before our very eyes.

The Universe as we know it began some 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. It was filled with matter, antimatter, radiation, etc.; all the particles and fields that we know of today, and possibly even more. From the earliest instants of the hot Big Bang, however, it wasn’t simply a uniform sea of these energetic quanta. Instead, there were tiny imperfections ⁠— at about the 0.003% level ⁠— on all scales, where some regions had slightly more or slightly less matter and energy than average.

Texas Instruments kicked off earnings season for the U.S.’s semiconductor manufacturers with a bang.

The profit report, seen as an indicator of what investors can expect from other chip makers, sent the shares higher in extended trading. Profits were higher than expected and management pointed to strong demand from customers in the industrial and automotive markets.

As the world’s energy demands increase, so does our consumption of fossil fuels. The result is a massive rise in greenhouse gases emissions with severely adverse environmental effects. To address this, scientists have been searching for alternative, renewable sources of energy.

A main candidate is hydrogen produced from organic waste, or “biomass,” of plants and animals. Biomass also absorbs, removes, and stores CO₂ from the atmosphere, while biomass decomposition can also bring us ways to negative emissions or greenhouse gases removal. But even though biomass heralds a way forward, there is still the question of the best way to maximize its conversion into energy.

There are currently two main methods for converting biomass into energy: gasification and pyrolysis. Gasification puts solid or liquid biomass at temperatures around 1000°C, converting it into gas and solid compounds; the gas is called “syngas” while the solid is “biochar.”