Lifeboat Foundation

As part of Conversations on the Quantum World, a webinar series hosted by the Caltech Science Exchange, Professor of Theoretical Physics Kathryn Zurek and Professor of Physics Rana Adhikari talk about one of the biggest mysteries in physics today: quantum gravity.

Quantum gravity refers to a set of theories attempting to unify the microscopic world of quantum physics with the macroscopic world of gravity and space itself. Zurek, a theorist, and Adhikari, an experimentalist, have teamed up with others to design a new tabletop-size experiment with the potential to detect signatures of quantum gravity.

Continue reading “Ask a Caltech Expert: Physicists Explain Quantum Gravity” »

More energy out than in. For 7 decades, fusion scientists have chased this elusive goal, known as energy gain. At 1 a.m. on 5 December, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California finally did it, focusing 2.05 megajoules of laser light onto a tiny capsule of fusion fuel and sparking an explosion that produced 3.15 MJ of energy—the equivalent of about three sticks of dynamite.

“This is extremely exciting, it’s a major breakthrough,” says Anne White, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the work.

Mark Herrmann, who leads NIF as the program director for weapons physics and design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, says it feels “wonderful,” adding: “I’m so proud of the team.”

As gasoline continues to lose its cachet as a reliable energy source, auto manufacturers have started to turn toward cleaner-burning fuels. However, they’re still trying to figure out how to use the cleanest fuel of all — the air we breathe.

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Illinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering Mohammad Asadi has developed solutions to two major problems facing lithium-air batteries. Lithium-air batteries hold more energy in a smaller battery size than their more common counterpart, the lithium-ion battery, but until now, lithium-air batteries have been overlooked in commercial applications because lithium-air batteries tended to die after fewer recharges and require a lot more energy to charge than can be generated by the battery later.

After almost a decade working in the oil and gas industry, Asadi turned his focus to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, particularly caused by the transportation industry, which consumes around 38 to 40 percent of the world’s energy. “With more widespread use of electric vehicles, you can drastically reduce transportation-based carbon emissions,” says Asadi. “But to put more electric vehicles on the road, we’ll need batteries—lots of them.”

Continue reading “Breakthrough in Lithium-air Batteries Could Help Put More Electric Vehicles On The Road” »

Long-Duration-Energy-Storage (LDES) resolves intermittency problems from wind and solar making the transition from fossil fuels workable.

Impact Of EVs On Power Supply: Even when EVs become mainstream, their cumulative demand for power would be a small fraction of India’s overall capacity. Power sector actually needs more consumers but the concern is whether the grid will be flexible enough to handle EVs.

This video gives an interesting theory as to where the lost city of Atlantis was (a location known today as the Eye of the Sahara), and it seems to be a pretty reasonable conjecture. What is relevant to this group however is how it might have been destroyed by a tsunami caused by a massive landslide in the Mediterranean — which is especially notable because the location is a great distance away from the Mediterranean, yet the evidence points to such a tsunami flooding a path all the way across Africa to the Atlantic, regardless of whether the city of Atlantis was in that path.

I think of our interconnected world today and wonder what would happen if such an unexpected event were to happen now, targeting a region that was in some way or another vital to modern civilization (such as with a concentration of all talent in an important field) without any suitable alternatives available.

Continue reading “Lost Roman Map has ATLANTIS at Eye of Sahara Africa! (Richat Structure)” »

A team mapping radio waves in the universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before.

Europe has an energy crisis. Factories are halting operations in the face of soaring energy prices; families are paying 50% more for heating (or opting to freeze in their homes), and Europe as a whole continues to destabilize its political position by making itself more dependent on Russia for natural gas.