Lifeboat Foundation

Cosmic physics mimicked on table-top as graphene enables Schwinger effect.

Concrete and glass are used throughout the interior and exterior of this holiday home in northern Portugal, which local studio Carvalho Araújo designed to blend in with its woodland setting.

Located in Vieira do Minho in the district of Braga, Casa na Caniçada is a second home built on a densely wooded 0.75-acre site next to the Caniçada reservoir.

An existing building of poor design and construction quality was removed to make way for the three-storey house designed by local office Carvalho Araújo.

Researchers from Osaka University and Osaka City University synthesize and crystallize a molecule that is otherwise too unstable to fully study in the laboratory, and is a model of a revolutionary class of magnets.

Since the first reported production in 2004, researchers have been hard at work using graphene and similar carbon-based materials to revolutionize electronics, sports, and many other disciplines. Now, researchers from Japan have made a discovery that will advance the long-elusive field of nanographene magnets.

In a study recently published in Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from Osaka University and collaborating partners have synthesized a crystalline nanographene with magnetic properties that have been predicted theoretically since the 1950s, but until now have been unconfirmed experimentally except at extremely low temperatures.

In the 1960s, American physicist Robert W. Bussard proposed a radical idea for interstellar travel: a spacecraft that relied on powerful magnetic fields to harvest hydrogen directly from the interstellar medium.

As it’s come to be known, the Bussard Ramjet has since been popularized by hard science fiction writers like Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, and science communicators like Carl Sagan. Unfortunately, a team of physicists recently analyzed the concept in more detail and concluded that Bussard’s idea is not practical. At a time when interstellar travel looks destined to become a real possibility, this analysis might seem like a wet blanket but is more of a reality check.

Continue reading “New research debunks a popular method for interstellar travel” »

Academics say the material could be used to create unclonable physical components suitable for supporting digital security.

A newly created nano-architected material exhibits a property that previously was just theoretically possible: it can refract light backward, regardless of the angle at which the light strikes the material.

This property is known as negative refraction and it means that the refractive index—the speed that light can travel through a given material—is negative across a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum at all angles.

Refraction is a common property in materials; think of the way a straw in a glass of water appears shifted to the side, or the way lenses in eyeglasses focus light. But negative refraction does not just involve shifting light a few degrees to one side. Rather, the light is sent in an angle completely opposite from the one at which it entered the material. This has not been observed in nature but, beginning in the 1960s, was theorized to occur in so-called artificially periodic materials—that is, materials constructed to have a specific structural pattern. Only now have fabrication processes have caught up to theory to make negative refraction a reality.

Iron that rusts in water theoretically shouldn’t corrode in contact with an “inert” supercritical fluid of carbon dioxide. But it does.

The reason has eluded materials scientists to now, but a team at Rice University has a theory that could contribute to new strategies to protect iron from the environment.

Materials theorist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering found through atom-level simulations that iron itself plays a role in its own corrosion when exposed to supercritical CO₂ (sCO₂) and trace amounts of water by promoting the formation of reactive species in the fluid that come back to attack it.

The photograph was captured by the probe’s WISPR (Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe) instrument when the spacecraft traveled at a distance of 16.9 million miles from the sun, inside our star’s corona.

The image shows distinct jets of solar material, dubbed coronal streamers, seen to the left/center of the image.

The bright spot you see in the above image is Mercury.

The earthen tone of this off-grid holiday home in Northern Mexico was selected to match the rock formations of the nearby Cumbres de Majalca National Park, which is known for its dramatic landscapes.

OAX Arquitectos completed this remote home as a vacation getaway for a large family. It is located within a national park in Mexico’s Chihuahua State, just south of the American border.

“As part of the development of the park, a section was reserved to house cottages, but because of its remote location lacks services,” said OAX Arquitectos, which is based in Monterey.