Lifeboat Foundation

It’s the most fundamental of processes—the evaporation of water from the surfaces of oceans and lakes, the burning off of fog in the morning sun, and the drying of briny ponds that leaves solid salt behind. Evaporation is all around us, and humans have been observing it and making use of it for as long as we have existed.

And yet, it turns out, we’ve been missing a major part of the picture all along.

In a series of painstakingly precise experiments, a team of researchers at MIT has demonstrated that heat isn’t alone in causing water to evaporate. Light, striking the water’s surface where air and water meet, can break water molecules away and float them into the air, causing evaporation in the absence of any source of heat.

A new research study from Opto-Electronic Advances discusses

The U.S. nuclear physics community is preparing to build the electron–ion collider (EIC), a flagship facility for probing the properties of matter and the strong nuclear force that holds matter together. The EIC will allow scientists to study how nucleons (protons and neutrons) arise from the complex interactions of quarks and gluons.

From MIT A Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent This paper describes MAIA, a Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

It’s like PC versus the Mac all over again.

Life arose on Earth very early on. After a few billion years, here we are: intelligent and technologically advanced. Where’s everyone else?

Healthy cells respond appropriately to changes in their environment. They do this by sensing what’s happening outside and relaying a command to the precise biomolecule in the precise domain that can carry out the necessary response.

Serious wine drinkers often have their preferences: Some prefer sweet hints of chocolate in a Malbec from Argentina, while others are drawn to a spicy and fruity Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa Valley. Wine connoisseurs firmly believe that the soil in which grapes are grown determines how it tastes.

Our number-crunching suggests that their plight could be much worse than previously thought.