Lifeboat Foundation

Just last month, physicists made the best case yet for why time crystals — hypothetical structures that have movement without energy — could technically exist as physical objects.

And now, four years after they were first proposed, scientists have managed to add a fourth dimension — the movement of time — to a crystal for the first time, giving it the ability to act as a kind of perpetual ‘time-keeper’.

First proposed by Nobel-Prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek back in 2012, time crystals are hypothetical structures that appear to have movement even at their lowest energy state, known as a ground state.

Continue reading “Physicists just created the world’s first time crystal” »

That’s one way to increase your iPhone battery.

“Nobody likes taxes. So it’s a brave move by Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, to announce that the entire country must pay if it continues to burn fossil fuels.”

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“Wind power has transformed the heart of fossil-fuel country. Can the rest of the United States follow suit?”

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D-Wave Systems announced Tuesday (Sept. 28, 2016) a new 2000-qubit processor, doubling the number of qubits over the previous-generation D-Wave 2X system. The new system will enable larger problems to be solved and performance improvements of up to 1000 times.

D-Wave’s quantum system runs a quantum-annealing algorithm to find the lowest points in a virtual energy landscape representing a computational problem to be solved. The lowest points in the landscape correspond to optimal or near-optimal solutions to the problem. The increase in qubit count enables larger and more difficult problems to be solved, and the ability to tune the rate of annealing of individual qubits will enhance application performance.

Continue reading “D-Wave Systems previews 2000-qubit quantum processor” »

A NASA-funded study has solved a longstanding mystery over the origin of X-rays that permeate space in our Solar System, but in doing so, it’s also discovered an entire group of high-energy X-rays that can’t be explained.

The research comes from a new analysis of data recorded by NASA’s DXL rocket mission, which took flight in 2012 to settle the question of what creates these low-energy X-ray emissions – called the diffuse soft X-ray background – in our corner of the galaxy.

At the time, there were two central hypotheses. X-ray emissions were known to come from solar wind, but scientists also thought they might originate from what’s called the Local Hot Bubble – a theorised region of hot gas that envelops our Solar System. But which was correct?

Continue reading “NASA just detected high-energy X-rays in space that don’t come from any known source” »

Realistic hover cars coming to future near you.

The quest to know the mysterious recipe for high-temperature superconductivity, which could enable revolutionary advances in technologies that make or use electricity, just took a big leap forward thanks to new research by an international team of experimental and theoretical physicists.

The research paper appears in the journal Science on Sept. 16, 2016. The research is focused on revealing the mysterious ingredients required for high-temperature superconductivity — the ability of a material’s electrons to pair up and travel without friction at relatively high temperatures, enabling them to lose no energy — to be super efficient — while conducting electricity.

Continue reading “Closing in on high-temperature superconductivity” »

According to the Kardashev scale, a Type III civilization is a society that has managed to harness (and control) the energy output of a galaxy. Here’s what that means.

To measure the level of a civilization’s advancement, the Kardashev scale focuses on the amount of energy that a civilization is able to harness. Obviously, the amount of power available to a civilization is linked to how widespread the civilization is (you can’t harness the power of a star if you are confined to your home planet, and you certainly can’t harness the power of a galaxy if you can’t even get out of your solar system).

Nice method for refrig.; now imagine it in autos/ various forms of transportation, buildings, appliances, etc.

NEW YORK, NY – 9/20/2016 (PRESS RELEASE JET) — Haier, a global leader in consumer electronics and appliances has launched a new compressor-free solid-state refrigeration technology. Haier created this new technology through integrating Silicon Valley resources, Haier Group R&D, Haier America R&D, Liquid King, Xi’an Jiaotong University, South China University of Technology and other resources. The new technology breaks the technological bottlenecks of compressor-based refrigeration appliance that have been used in the industry for a century.

Continue reading “Haier Introduces New Disruptive Refrigeration Technology” »