Lifeboat Foundation

Deep space is a hostile environment for humans, which makes the long journey to Mars a serious stumbling block for manned missions. A nuclear-powered rocket could slash the journey time, and NASA has announced plans to test the technology by 2027 at the latest.

Most spacecraft to date have used chemical rockets packed with fuel and oxidizer, which rely on combustion to propel them through space. A nuclear-powered rocket would instead use a fission reactor to heat liquid hydrogen to very high temperatures and then blast it out the back of the spacecraft.

These kinds of engines could be up to three times more efficient than those in conventional rockets, and could cut the time to transit from Earth to Mars from roughly seven months to as little as six weeks. NASA has teamed up with DARPA to make the idea a reality, signing a deal with defense contractor Lockheed Martin to launch a working prototype into space as early as 2025.

Weird things happen on the quantum level. Whole clouds of particles can become entangled, their individuality lost as they act as one.

Now scientists have observed, for the first time, ultracold atoms cooled to a quantum state chemically reacting as a collective, rather than haphazardly forming new molecules after bumping into each other by chance.

“What we saw lined up with the theoretical predictions,” says Cheng Chin, a physicist at the University of Chicago and senior author of the study. “This has been a scientific goal for 20 years, so it’s a very exciting era.”

“This has been a scientific goal for 20 years, so it’s a very exciting era.”

In a significant advance, scientists have obtained the first proof of a phenomenon known as “quantum superchemistry.” This effect was previously predicted but never actually observed in the laboratory.

The University of Chicago researchers that led this experiment characterize quantum superchemistry as a “phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collectively accelerated reactions.”

Continue reading “First evidence of ‘quantum superchemistry’ observed in lab” »

Pythagoras first discovered that the vibrations of strings are drastically enhanced at certain frequencies. This discovery forms the basis of our tone system. Such natural vibrations ubiquitously exist in objects regardless of their size scales and are widely utilized to derive their species, constituents, and morphology. For example, molecular vibrations at a terahertz rate have become the most common fingerprints for the identification of chemicals and the structural analysis of large biomolecules.

Recently, natural vibrations of particles at the mesoscopic scale have received growing interest, since this category includes a wide range of functional particles, as well as most biological cells and viruses. However, natural vibrations of these mesoscopic particles have remained hidden from existing technologies.

These particles with sizes ranging from 100 nm to 100 μm are expected to vibrate faintly at megahertz to gigahertz rates. This frequency regime could not be resolved by current Raman and Brillouin spectroscopies, however, due to strong Rayleigh-wing scattering, while the performances of piezoelectric techniques that are widely exploited in macroscopic systems degrade significantly at frequencies beyond a few megahertz.

Protein dynamics play a crucial role in diverse functions. The intracellular environment significantly influences protein dynamics, particularly for intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs).

A research group led Prof. Zhang Lihua from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with Assoc. Prof. Gong Zhou from the Precision Measurement Science and Technology Innovation Research Institute of CAS, has proposed a strategy using in-vivo chemical cross-linking and mass spectrometry (in-vivo XL-MS) to decode the dynamic structure of proteins within cells.

In-vivo XL-MS is potential for analyzing the dynamic structure of proteins within cells due to its high throughput, high sensitivity, and low requirements for protein purity.

A team from the University of Chicago has announced the first evidence for “quantum superchemistry”—a phenomenon where particles in the same quantum state undergo collective accelerated reactions. The effect had been predicted, but never observed in the laboratory.

Sandwich compounds are special chemical compounds used as basic building blocks in organometallic chemistry. So far, their structure has always been linear.

Recently, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Marburg were the first to make stacked sandwich complexes form a nano-sized ring. Physical and other properties of these cyclocene structures will now be further investigated. The researchers report their findings in Nature.

Sandwich complexes were developed about 70 years ago and have a sandwich-like structure. Two flat aromatic organic rings (the “slices of bread”) are filled with a single, central metal atom in between. Like the slices of bread, both rings are arranged in parallel. Adding further layers of “bread” and “filling” produces triple or multiple sandwiches.

A team of scientists led by the University of Oxford have achieved a significant breakthrough in detecting modifications on protein structures. The method, published in Nature Nanotechnology, employs innovative nanopore technology to identify structural variations at the single-molecule level, even deep within long protein chains.

Human cells contain approximately 20,000 protein-encoding genes. However, the actual number of proteins observed in cells is far greater, with over 1,000,000 different structures known. These variants are generated through a process known as post-translational modification (PTM), which occurs after a protein has been transcribed from DNA.

PTM introduces structural changes such as the addition of chemical groups or carbohydrate chains to the individual amino acids that make up proteins. This results in hundreds of possible variations for the same protein chain.

Fuel cells are compact energy conversion units that utilize clean energy sources like hydrogen and convert them into electricity through a series of oxidation–reduction reactions. Specifically, proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs), an integral part of electric vehicles, utilize proton-conductive membranes for operation. Unfortunately, these membranes suffer from a trade-off between high durability and high ion conductivity, affecting the lifetime and performance of PEMFCs.

To overcome this issue, scientists have synthesized chemically and physically modified perfluorosulfonic acid polymer membranes, such as Nafion HP, Nafion XL, and Gore-Select, which have proven to be much more durable than unmodified membranes conventionally employed in fuel-cell operations.

Unfortunately, none of the existing proton-conductive membranes have fulfilled the highly challenging technical target—passing an accelerated durability test or a combined chemical and mechanical test—set by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to facilitate their use in automobile fuel cells by 2025.