Lifeboat Foundation

China’s 2nd spacelab launches next week. Now, I wonder how QSS will be leveraged given the note on new communication capabilities as well as other types of experiments that can be conducted.

Chinese space agency is all set to launch its second spacelab Tiangong-2 next week. Long March 2F rocket will lift up the spacelab and both the entities have been transported to the launch pad located at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, yesterday. Tiangong-2 will test life support systems and refueling technology for its 60 ton modular space station.

Tiangong-2 will be placed in an orbit of 393 kilometers above the Earth and it will help in studying fundamental physics, biology, fluid mechanics in microgravity, space science and will monitor Earth from space. In addition, it has the capability to measure the topography of the oceans with very high precision which will enable scientists to study Earth’s gravity field.

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Physicists have for the first time succeeded in directly visualising on small scales how a material abruptly changes its state from conducting to insulating at low temperatures. Researchers Erik van Heumen of the University of Amsterdam and Alex McLeod from the University of California thereby provide evidence for a 60-year-old theory that explains this phenomenon and pave the way for more energy efficient technologies. The team’s experiments are described in the latest edition of Nature Physics.

Materials that conduct electricity at high temperature but are insulating at lower temperatures have been known for decades. However, until recently it was not possible to directly measure how such phase transitions proceed on small length scales. Using a new technique, Van Heumen and McLeod are now able to visualise the changes taking place in the material during such a phase transition on the nanometer scale.

In their experiments, the team observed a so-called percolation transition taking place among the electrons in the material. Above a certain critical temperature, the electrons can move relatively easily through the material enabling the flow of electrical current. When the temperature drops below a threshold temperature, small imperfections in the material trigger a kind of traffic jam for the electrons. Starting from small nanometer length scales, this traffic jam slowly grows outwards across the entire material. The previously freely moving electrons come to an abrupt halt and the material loses its conducting properties.

Produce and detect gravitational fields at will using magnetic fields, control them for studying them, work with them to produce new technologies — it sounds daring, but Prof. André Füzfa of Namur University has proposed just that in an article published in the scientific journal Physical Review D. If followed, this proposal could transform physics and shake up Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

At present, scientists study gravitational fields passively: they observe and try to understand existing gravitational fields produced by large inertial masses, such as stars or Earth, without being able to change them as is done, for example, with magnetic fields.

It was this frustration that led Füzfa to attempt a revolutionary approach: creating gravitational fields at will from well-controlled magnetic fields and observing how these magnetic fields could bend space-time.

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Most basic physics textbooks describe laser light in fairly simple terms: a beam travels directly from one point to another and, unless it strikes a mirror or other reflective surface, will continue traveling along an arrow-straight path, gradually expanding in size due to the wave nature of light. But these basic rules go out the window with high-intensity laser light.

Powerful laser beams, given the right conditions, will act as their own lenses and “self-focus” into a tighter, even more intense beam. University of Maryland physicists have discovered that these self-focused laser pulses also generate violent swirls of optical energy that strongly resemble smoke rings. In these donut-shaped light structures, known as “spatiotemporal optical vortices,” the light energy flows through the inside of the ring and then loops back around the outside.

The vortices travel along with the laser pulse at the speed of light and control the energy flow around it. The newly discovered optical structures are described in the September 9, 2016 issue of the journal Physical Review X.

Nobody understands why deep neural networks are so good at solving complex problems. Now physicists say the secret is buried in the laws of physics.

An actual EM Drive is about to be launched into space for the first time, so scientists can finally figure out — once and for all — if it really is possible for a rocket engine to generate thrust without any kind of exhaust or propellant.

Built by American inventor and chemical engineer, Guido Fetta, the EM Drive is as controversial as it gets, because while certain experiments have suggested that such an engine could work, it also goes against one of the most fundamental laws of physics we have.

As Newton’s Third Law states, “To each action there’s an equal and opposite reaction,” and many physicists say the EM Drive categorically violates that law.

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The EmDrive is a new type of rocket engine first proposed by British scientist/electrical engineer Roger Shawyer in 1999. Unlike conventional space rocket engines, the EmDrive doesn’t require any kind of propellant (also known as a reaction mass) to make propulsion possible, and hence partially disobeying Newton’s Third Law: “To each action there’s an equal and opposite reaction”.

Despite the fact that this seems to violate the known laws of physics, a prototype device was submitted to NASA’s Eagleworks lab for testing which came back positive, reports Digital Trends.

Continue reading “Breaking Newton’s Third Law: Impossible Space Engine ‘The EMdrive’ Passes Peer Review” »

(Phys.org)—Are time crystals just a mathematical curiosity, or could they actually physically exist? Physicists have been debating this question since 2012, when Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of time crystals. He argued that these hypothetical objects can exhibit periodic motion, such as moving in a circular orbit, in their state of lowest energy, or their “ground state.” Theoretically, objects in their ground states don’t have enough energy to move at all.

In the years since, other physicists have proposed various arguments for why the physical existence of time crystals is impossible—and most physicists do seem to think that time crystals are physically impossible because of their odd properties. Even though time crystals couldn’t be used to generate useful energy (since disturbing them makes them stop moving), and don’t violate the second law of thermodynamics, they do violate a fundamental symmetry of the laws of physics.

However, now in a new paper published in Physical Review Letters, physicists from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and Microsoft Station Q (a Microsoft research lab located on the UCSB campus) have demonstrated that it may be possible for time crystals to physically exist.

A new technique uses the curious physical laws of the nano-scale itself to “program” nanobots. Welcome to the future of nanotechnology.

Nanorobotics has long been touted as one of the most promising “miracle technologies” of the future. But one of the fundamental problems with such extreme miniaturization is how to “program” nanobots—after all, you can’t very well shrink computer circuitry to fit within nanometer-scale technology.

Continue reading “These Nanobots Can Repair Circuits All by Themselves” »