Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks to a quirk of quantum theory, subatomic particles can emit light as they travel through a seemingly empty vacuum.

Blue-tinged Cherenkov radiation could help to illuminate quantum interactions between light and matter.

Get ready for a future in which most things you need to live, food, housing, transportation, and information, are free or nearly free.

The influential economic theorist looks ahead to a world of virtually free energy and zero marginal cost production, and to a desperate race against climate change.

Blue mushrooms flourishing in Rotorua scenic reserve.

The rare fossil find from China is the best preserved example yet of this very odd dinosaur group.

Tornado warnings were issued in the Panhandle of Texas Tuesday afternoon, the first salvo in what’s predicted to be a violent night of weather across the southern Plains.

“Severe thunderstorms are likely into tonight, particularly across the Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma,” the Storm Prediction Center warned. “A couple of strong tornadoes, very large hail, and damaging winds will all be possible.”

Hail nearly the size of baseballs was reported to be slamming into Fritch, Texas, as of late afternoon, the center reported. That’s about 20 miles northeast of Amarillo.

Continue reading “Tornado warnings issued in Texas as violent night of weather begins for millions” »

Thought to lurk deep within Neptune and Uranus, the extreme material is actually half as hot as the surface of the sun.

May 7 (UPI) — Raytheon Company successfully tested a hot fire rocket motor for DARPA’s Multi-Azimuth Defense Fast Intercept Round Engagement System.

The test for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was conducted on an undisclosed date at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, Raytheon announced Monday.

The MAD-FIRES interceptor is designed to provide self-defense capability that defeats multiple waves of anti-ship missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, small planes, fast in-shore attack craft and other platforms that “pose a perennial, evolving and potentially lethal threat to ships and other maritime vessels,” according to the agency.

Continue reading “Raytheon tests motor for DARPA’s MAD-FIRES self-defense interceptor” »

Giant forces slowly move continents across a viscous layer of the Earth, like biscuits gliding over a warm toffee ocean. This stresses the continents, and twists and contorts the crust.

Antimatter isn’t just made of antiparticles, it’s also made of waves. Now we know that this holds true even at the level of a single antimatter particle.

Physicists have known for a long time that just about everything — light and other forms of energy, but also every atom in your body — exists as both particles and waves, a concept known as particle-wave duality. That’s been shown again and again in experiments. But antimatter particles, which are identical to their matter partners, except for their opposite charge and spin, are much more difficult to experiment with. These twins of matter flit into existence fleetingly, usually in massive particle accelerators.

But now, physicists have shown at the level of a single positron — an antimatter twin of the electron — that antimatter, too, is made of both particles and waves.

Continue reading “Antimatter Is Both a Particle and a Wave, New Experiment Confirms” »