Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists demonstrate a low-power “wake-up” receiver one-tenth the size of other devices.

The kardeshev scale of possible future technological advance.

In 1964, Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev figured that civilizations can be categorized by the total amount of energy available to them. He called it the Kardashev Scale. He initially came up with 3 civilization types; type 1, type 2, and type 3. However, other astronomers have recently extended the scale from type 0 all the way to type 7 as new theories in modern physics have emerged. Check out the complete playlist as we unveil each level of the Kardashev Scale! Enjoy the videos, and do let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Chinese researchers have successfully fabricated mechanical metamaterials with ultra-high energy absorption capacity using ion track technology. The results were published in Nature Communications as an Editor’s Highlight.

The study was conducted by the researchers from the Materials Research Center of the Institute of Modern Physics (IMP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and their collaborators from Chongqing University.

Mechanical metamaterials refer to a class of composite materials with artificially designed structures, which exhibit extraordinary mechanical properties that traditional materials do not have. Among them, energy absorption mechanical metamaterials can absorb mechanical energy more efficiently, which requires the material itself to equip both high strength and high strain capacity, which, however, hardly co-exist in general.

In a project commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have developed poly(styrenesulfonic acid)-based PEMs with a high density of sulfonic acid groups.

One of the key components of environmentally friendly polymer electrolyte fuel cells is a polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM). It generates electrical energy through a reaction between hydrogen and oxygen gases. Examples of practical fuel cells include fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) and fuel cell combined heat and power (CHP) systems.

The best-known PEM is a membrane based on a perfluorosulfonic acid polymer, such as Nafion, which was developed by DuPont in the 1960s. It has a good proton conductivity of 0.1 S/cm at 70–90 °C under humidified conditions. Under these conditions, protons can be released from sulfonic acid groups.

DGIST Professor Yoonkyu Lee’s research team used intense light on the surface of a copper wire to synthesize graphene, thereby increasing the production rate and lowering the production cost of the high-quality transparent-flexible electrode materials and consequently enabling its mass production. The results were published in the February 23 issue of Nano Energy.

This technology is applicable to various 2D materials, and its applicability can be extended to the synthesis of various metal-2D material nanowires.

The research team used copper-graphene nanowires to implement high-performance transparent-flexible electronic devices such as transparent-flexible electrodes, transparent supercapacitors and transparent heaters and to thereby demonstrate the commercial viability of this material.

Experiments show ease by which organisms can evolve the ability to harness sunlight for energy.

The energy per unit mass of 500 Wh/kg is twice that of typical Li-ion batteries. In addition to doubling the range of EVs, this could enable longer-haul electrified aviation.

Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL) has today launched a new ‘condensed battery’ with up to 500 Wh/kg. This ultra-high energy density could enable the electrification of passenger aircraft.

Year 2023 face_with_colon_three

If humanity is ever to consider substantial, long-term colonization of Mars, the resources needed are going to be extensive. For a long-term human presence on Mars to be established, serious thought would need to be given to terraforming the planet. One major requirement for such terraforming is having the protection of a planetary magnetic field — which Mars currently does not have. The Earth’s magnetosphere helps protect the planet from the potential sterilizing effects of cosmic rays and also helps retain the atmosphere, which would otherwise by stripped by large solar storms as they pass over the planet. Mars does have small patches of remnant surface magnetic field, but these are localized in the southern hemisphere and are not of sufficient size or magnitude to protect the planet or a colony.

In this article we explore comprehensively for the first time, the practical and engineering challenges that affect the feasibility of creating an artificial magnetic field capable of encompassing Mars. This includes the concerns that define the design, where to locate the magnetic field generator and possible construction strategies. The rationale here is not to justify the need for a planetary magnetosphere but to put figures on the practicalities so as to be able to weigh the pros and cons of the different engineering approaches.

Continue reading “How to create an artificial magnetosphere for Mars” »

face_with_colon_three year 2017.

First observed in liquid helium below the lambda point, superfluidity manifests itself in a number of fascinating ways. In the superfluid phase, helium can creep up along the walls of a container, boil without bubbles, or even flow without friction around obstacles. As early as 1938, Fritz London suggested a link between superfluidity and Bose–Einstein condensation (BEC)³. Indeed, superfluidity is now known to be related to the finite amount of energy needed to create collective excitations in the quantum liquid^4,5,6,7, and the link proposed by London was further evidenced by the observation of superfluidity in ultracold atomic BECs^1,8. A quantitative description is given by the Gross–Pitaevskii (GP) equation^9,10 (see Methods) and the perturbation theory for elementary excitations developed by Bogoliubov¹¹. First derived for atomic condensates, this theory has since been successfully applied to a variety of systems, and the mathematical framework of the GP equation naturally leads to important analogies between BEC and nonlinear optics^12,13,14. Recently, it has been extended to include condensates out of thermal equilibrium, like those composed of interacting photons or bosonic quasiparticles such as microcavity exciton-polaritons and magnons^14,15. In particular, for exciton-polaritons, the observation of many-body effects related to condensation and superfluidity such as the excitation of quantized vortices, the formation of metastable currents and the suppression of scattering from potential barriers^{2,16,17,18,19,20} have shown the rich phenomenology that exists within non-equilibrium condensates. Polaritons are confined to two dimensions and the reduced dimensionality introduces an additional element of interest for the topological ordering mechanism leading to condensation, as recently evidenced in ref. 21. However, until now, such phenomena have mainly been observed in microcavities embedding quantum wells of III–V or II–VI semiconductors. As a result, experiments must be performed at low temperatures (below ∼ 20 K), beyond which excitons autoionize. This is a consequence of the low binding energy typical of Wannier–Mott excitons. Frenkel excitons, which are characteristic of organic semiconductors, possess large binding energies that readily allow for strong light–matter coupling and the formation of polaritons at room temperature. Remarkably, in spite of weaker interactions as compared to inorganic polaritons²², condensation and the spontaneous formation of vortices have also been observed in organic microcavities^23,24,25. However, the small polariton–polariton interaction constants, structural inhomogeneity and short lifetimes in these structures have until now prevented the observation of behaviour directly related to the quantum fluid dynamics (such as superfluidity). In this work, we show that superfluidity can indeed be achieved at room temperature and this is, in part, a result of the much larger polariton densities attainable in organic microcavities, which compensate for their weaker nonlinearities.

Our sample consists of an optical microcavity composed of two dielectric mirrors surrounding a thin film of 2,7-Bis[9,9-di(4-methylphenyl)-fluoren-2-yl]-9,9-di(4-methylphenyl)fluorene (TDAF) organic molecules. Light–matter interaction in this system is so strong that it leads to the formation of hybrid light–matter modes (polaritons), with a Rabi energy 2 Ω_R ∼ 0.6 eV. A similar structure has been used previously to demonstrate polariton condensation under high-energy non-resonant excitation²⁴. Upon resonant excitation, it allows for the injection and flow of polaritons with a well-defined density, polarization and group velocity.

Continue reading “Room-temperature superfluidity in a polariton condensate Physics” »