Lifeboat Foundation

A team at UPV’s Nanophotonics Technology Center has discovered a new fundamental symmetry in electromagnetism, acoustics and elasticity laws: a temporal supersymmetry.

According to Carlos García Meca and Andrés Macho Ortiz, researchers at NTC-UPV, this new symmetry allows the conservation of the linear moment between dramatically different physical systems. This paves the way to designing pioneering optical, acoustic and elastic devices, including invisible omnidirectional, polarization-independent materials, ultra-compact frequency shifters, isolators and pulse-shape transformers.

“These devices allow us to unusually modify different properties of light signals inside photonic circuits to process the spread of information. This is vital in communication systems. Moreover, we can adapt the functionality of those devices to the requirements at any time, as they are dynamically configurable,” explained Carlos García Meca.

Circa 2018 face_with_colon_three

Jong-Kyu Park and colleagues predicted a set of distortions that could control ELMs without any additional instabilities. They then tested these distortions at the Korean Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR)—a ring-shaped magnetic fusion confinement device. Their experiments worked.

“We show for the first time the full 3D field operating window in a tokamak to suppress ELMs without stirring up core instabilities or excessively degrading confinement,” Park said. “For a long time we thought it would be too computationally difficult to identify all beneficial symmetry-breaking fields, but our work now demonstrates a simple procedure to identify the set of all such configurations.”

Continue reading “Nuclear fusion scientists just solved a major problem in harnessing plasma hotter than the Sun” »

Circa 2013

In what could prove to be a major breakthrough in quantum memory storage and information processing, German researchers have frozen the fastest thing in the universe: light. And they did so for a record-breaking one minute.

The U.S. space agency National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) are inviting coders, entrepreneurs, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, artists, and technologists to participate in a virtual hackathon May 30–31 dedicated to putting open data to work in developing solutions to issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the global Space Apps COVID-19 Challenge, participants from around the world will create virtual teams that – during a 48-hour period – will use Earth observation data to propose solutions to COVID-19-related challenges ranging from studying the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and its spread to the impact the disease is having on the Earth system. Registration for this challenge opens in mid-May.

“There’s a tremendous need for our collective ingenuity right now,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “I can’t imagine a more worthy focus than COVID-19 on which to direct the energy and enthusiasm from around the world with the Space Apps Challenge that always generates such amazing solutions.”

The unique capabilities of NASA and its partner space agencies in the areas of science and technology enable them to lend a hand during this global crisis. Since the start of the global outbreak, Earth science specialists from each agency have been exploring ways to use unique Earth observation data to aid understanding of the interplay of the Earth system – on global to local scales – with aspects of the COVID-19 outbreak, including, potentially, our ability to combat it. The hackathon will also examine the human and economic response to the virus.

Continue reading “NASA, partners launch virtual hackathon to develop COVID-19 solutions” »

Scientists from Princeton University and the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have used radio frequency waves and temperature to stabilize the white-hot and volatile plasma that swirls inside of fusion reactors like tokamaks and stellarators.

The radio waves disrupt the magnetic islands that form and disrupt the plasma flow, and temperature magnifies the stabilizing effect. As the saying goes, the disruptor of your disruptor is your friend.

Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla pioneered many modern technologies and made some strange inventions, like the “earthquake-generator.”

A new paper by physicist Edward Witten proposes hunting Planet 9 using a fleet of laser-launched probes like Breakthrough Starshots’.

As if this contagion movie we are living can not get any more strange. A University of Pittsburgh researcher who claimed to have been on the verge of a significant breakthrough in his research on the coronavirus was killed in what appears to me a murder-suicide…

While police are treating the death as a homicide, they have yet to find any evidence that it was related to his research.

Rhesus macaques don’t monkey around when it comes to HIV; they have a protein that effectively disables invading HIV particles.

A group of University of Chicago scientists announced an innovative study that explains how the macaques’ immune protein, called TRIM5α, works its magic. It also represents a significant step forward in the science of modeling how complex biological proteins assemble themselves, the scientists said.

“These proteins work together to encase the HIV capsid in a hexagonal net and restrict viral activity,” said postdoctoral fellow Alvin Yu and lead author of the study, which was published in Nature Communications.