Lifeboat Foundation

Do you ever mesh your other hobbies with the space stuff? Yes. I once turned the results of one of my experiments into a musical. In 2020, during the lockdowns, I put a scientific instrument on my balcony to measure light, sound and pollution before and after the pandemic. I ended up with several graphs and thought, Why not turn these into a musical? So, me and my brother got several musical instruments and played notes according to how high or low each point on the graph was. We actually submitted that to the NASA SpaceApps COVID-19 Challenge and became one of the top six global winners.

Do you think you’ll study space science at university when you’re older? I think so. Either aerospace or astrophysics, or maybe both.

Continue reading “‘I’m really into planetary defence’: Meet the 13-year-old whose science project could protect Earth from asteroids” »

In an effort to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe as well as the nature of Dark Matter, researchers have zeroed in on an upcoming set of experiments designed to measure time dilation.

According to the researchers behind the pioneering approach, these time dilation experiments should either add support to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and the theories of Leonhard Euler regarding the movement of celestial objects or open the door to a whole new understanding of time and matter.

Einstein and Euler Still Unable to Fully Explain Dark Matter and the Expanding Universe.

Under certain conditions—usually exceedingly cold ones—some materials shift their structure to unlock new, superconducting behavior. This structural shift is known as a “nematic transition,” and physicists suspect that it offers a new way to drive materials into a superconducting state where electrons can flow entirely friction-free.

But what exactly drives this transition in the first place? The answer could help scientists improve existing superconductors and discover new ones.

Now, MIT physicists have identified the key to how one class of superconductors undergoes a nematic transition, and it’s in surprising contrast to what many scientists had assumed.

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who died earlier this year, is famous for forecasting a continuous rise in the density of transistors that we can pack onto semiconductor chips. James McKenzie looks at how “Moore’s law” is still going strong after almost six decades, but warns that further progress is becoming harder and ever more expensive to sustain.

It has almost been 20 years since the establishment of the field of two-dimensional (2D) materials with the discovery of unique properties of graphene, a single, atomically thin layer of graphite. The significance of graphene and its one-of-a-kind properties was recognized as early as 2010 when the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to A. Geim and K. Novoselov for their work on graphene. However, graphene has been around for a while, though researchers simply did not realize what it was, or how special it is (often, it was considered annoying dirt on nice, clean surfaces of metals REF). Some scientists even dismissed the idea that 2D materials could exist in our three-dimensional world.

Today, things are different. 2D materials are one of the most exciting and fascinating subjects of study for researchers from many disciplines, including physics, chemistry and engineering. 2D materials are not only interesting from a scientific point of view, they are also extremely interesting for industrial and technological applications, such as touchscreens and batteries.

We are also getting very good at discovering and preparing new 2D materials, and the list of known and available 2D materials is rapidly expanding. The 2D materials family is getting very large and graphene is not alone anymore. Instead, it now has a lot of 2D relatives with different properties and vastly diverse applications, predicted or already achieved.

University of Chicago physicists have finally engineered a way to create turbulence in a tank of water by using a ring of jets to blow loops until an isolated “ball” of turbulence forms and stays.

Long a matter of philosophical speculation, the idea of multiple realities has been given new artistic licence by physics.

A novel type of neural network is helping physicists with the daunting challenge of data analysis.

Editor’s note: For a more mainstream assessment of this idea, see this article by Dr. Ethan Siegel.

Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematician and physicist from the University of Oxford who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, claims our universe has gone through multiple Big Bangs, with another one coming in our future.

Continue reading “Controversial claim from Nobel Prize winner: The universe keeps dying and being reborn” »