Lifeboat Foundation

Has the quest for room temperature superconductivity finally succeeded? Researchers at the University of Rochester (U of R), who previously were forced to retract a controversial claim of room temperature superconductivity at high pressures, are back with an even more spectacular claim. This week in they report a new material that superconducts at room temperature—and not much more than ambient pressures.

“If this is correct, it’s completely revolutionary,” says James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida who was not involved with the work. A room temperature superconductor would usher in a century-long dream. Existing superconductors require expensive and bulky chilling systems to conduct electricity frictionlessly, but room temperature materials could lead to hyperefficient electricity grids and computer chips, as well as the ultrapowerful magnets needed for levitating trains and fusion power.

But given the U of R group’s recent retraction, many physicists won’t be easily convinced. “I think they will have to do some real work and be really open for people to believe it,” Hamlin says. Jorge Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, and a vociferous critic of the earlier work, is even more blunt. “I doubt [the new result], because I don’t trust these authors.”

In a historic achievement, University of Rochester researchers have created a superconducting material at both a temperature and pressure low enough for practical applications.

“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” according to a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics. In a paper in Nature, the researchers describe a nitrogen-doped lutetium hydride (NDLH) that exhibits superconductivity at 69 degrees Fahrenheit (20.5 degrees Celsius) and 10 kilobars (145,000 pounds per square inch, or psi) of pressure.

Continue reading “Viable superconducting material created at low temperature and low pressure” »

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“With this material, the dawn of ambient superconductivity and applied technologies has arrived,” said the press release, which was published today by a team led by Ranga Dias, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and physics.

Studying the relationship between the arrangement of water molecules incorporated into layered materials like clays and the arrangement of ions within these materials has been a difficult experiment to conduct.

However, researchers have now succeeded in observing these interactions for the first time by utilizing a technique commonly used for measuring extremely small masses and molecular interactions at the nanoscale.

The nanoscale refers to a length scale that is extremely small, typically on the order of nanometers (nm), which is one billionth of a meter. At this scale, materials and systems exhibit unique properties and behaviors that are different from those observed at larger length scales. The prefix “nano-” is derived from the Greek word “nanos,” which means “dwarf” or “very small.” Nanoscale phenomena are relevant to many fields, including materials science, chemistry, biology, and physics.

Robots are all around us, from drones filming videos in the sky to serving food in restaurants and diffusing bombs in emergencies. Slowly but surely, robots are improving the quality of human life by augmenting our abilities, freeing up time, and enhancing our personal safety and well-being. While existing robots are becoming more proficient with simple tasks, handling more complex requests will require more development in both mobility and intelligence.

Columbia Engineering and Toyota Research Institute computer scientists are delving into psychology, physics, and geometry to create algorithms so that robots can adapt to their surroundings and learn how to do things independently. This work is vital to enabling robots to address new challenges stemming from an aging society and provide better support, especially for seniors and people with disabilities.

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Similar in function to ballast tanks in submarines or fish bladders, many water-based bacteria use gas vesicles to regulate their floatability. In a new publication in Cell, scientists from the Departments of Bionanoscience and Imaging Physics now describe the molecular structure of these vesicles for the first time. These gas vesicles were also recently repurposed as contrast agents for ultrasound imaging.

Gas vesicles (GVs) are hollow, cylindrical nanostructures made of a thin protein-based shell and filled with gas. Similar in function to ballast tanks in submarines or fish bladders, many water-based bacteria use these structures to regulate their floatability. “For example, certain cyanobacteria use gas vesicles to float to the surface in order to harvest light for photosynthesis, a phenomenon sometimes seen at enormous scale in toxic algal blooms,” says Arjen Jakobi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Bionanoscience.

There are very specific requirements for such structures: for bacteria to stay afloat, GVs must occupy a substantial proportion of the cell, which involves forming compartments that extend over hundreds of nanometers in size. To maximize floatability, the shell must be constructed from minimal material. At the same time, the shell needs to provide resistance to the pressure from the surrounding water to maintain the ability to float with changes in water depth. GVs have therefore evolved as rigid, thin-walled structures composed of a single protein that repeats many thousands of times to form the GV shell.

Rudy Rucker says:

I’m quite happy with this resolution of the conflict between determinism and free will…

Continue reading “Computational irreducibility in Wolfram’s digital physics, and free will” »

The deeper you get into physics, the simpler it becomes. The starting point of this wonderful book about Stephen Hawking’s ‘biggest legacy’ (which no one outside of physics has heard of) is the problem of our insignificance. Make a change in almost any of the slippery, basic physical properties of the universe and we’re toast – life would not be possible. If, for example, the universe had expanded even slightly more slowly than it did after the Big Bang it would have collapsed in on itself. Result? No us. A fraction faster and no galaxies would form, let alone habitable planets. In the incandescent beginning of the universe, each of these basic physical properties was as vacillating as a dream: they could have ended up being pretty much anything. How did they all, so sweetly, settle on the minuscule range of values that brought about us?

One answer is to say God did it. He deliberately selected our universe (and not one of the overwhelmingly more probable alternatives) to go forth and be fecund. Another suggestion is that all the possible universes that could exist do exist, now, at the same time – trillions and trillions of them, humming about like bees – and we’re just in one of the ones we could be in. This idea is called the multiverse. In a multiverse there’s nothing special about the incredible unlikeliness of being. Leibnitz came up with the proposal first, adding piously that God has placed us in the best universe of all possible universes. People have been making fun of that since Voltaire. Another idea is that new ‘worlds’ are being created endlessly, all equally real. Every time you make a cup of coffee, a multiplicity of alternative worlds splits off in which you made it with more milk, or added honey instead of sugar, or the coffee machine exploded and you didn’t make it at all.

Researchers at Kyushu University, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Osaka University in Japan have recently introduced a new strategy for synthesizing multi-layer hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), a material that could be used to integrate different 2D materials in electronic devices, while preserving their unique properties. Their proposed approach, outlined in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could facilitate the fabrication of new highly performing graphene-based devices.

“The atomically flat 2D insulator hBN is a key material for the integration of 2D materials into electronic devices,” Hiroki Ago, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “For example, the highest carrier mobility in monolayer graphene is achieved only when it is sandwiched by multilayer hBN. Superconductivity observed in twisted bilayer graphene also needs multilayer hBN to isolate from environment.”

In addition to its value for fabricating graphene-based devices, hBN can also be used to integrate transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) in devices, achieving strong photoluminescence and high carrier mobility. It can also be valuable for conducting studies focusing on moiré physics.