Lifeboat Foundation

A hidden mechanism for achieving glides of hundreds of feet is revealed by computational modelling.

Scientists are currently thinking of ways to create robots resembling the gliding motion of flying snakes, according to a study published today (Dec .13) in Physics of Fluids.

‘Undulations’ encourage lift.

Continue reading “Future flying robots could be inspired by the aerodynamics of gliding snakes” »

“I wouldn’t want to be on the team figuring out how to build a Jupiter-sized spacecraft, but the odds aren’t zero.”

A team of scientists believes we may be able to detect alien spacecraft flying through distant solar systems using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US.

Though the scientists from Applied Physics, a research institute in New York, concede that gravitational wave (GW) detection is “in its infancy”, they also say it is “a sophisticated science” that could be used to “detect extra-terrestrial mega-technology,” in a paper available in pre-print server arXiv.

Fusion Energy For All Humanity — Prof Dr. Tony Donné Ph.D. — Program Manager (CEO), EUROfusion

Prof. Dr. Tony Donne, Ph.D. is Program Manager (CEO) of the EUROfusion (https://www.euro-fusion.org/) research consortium, a European consortium of 30 national fusion research institutes, in 26 EU countries, plus Switzerland and Ukraine, where he coordinates the work of over 4,000 scientists and engineers.

Continue reading “Prof. Dr. Tony Donne, Ph.D. — Program Manager (CEO), EUROfusion — Fusion Energy For All Humanity” »

Life is really weird. From the vantage point of a physicist, it is even stranger. Life is unlike any other phenomenon in physics. Stars, electrons, and black holes are all amazing in their own ways. But only life invents, and the first thing life invents is itself.

Life is creative in a way that no other physical system can be, and its unique use of information may be the key to understanding what makes it different from other physical systems. Now, thanks to a new grant my colleagues and I have received from the Templeton Foundation, we are going to be exploring exactly how information allows life to work its magic. I’m very excited about the project, and this essay is my first report from the frontier as we plunge into terra incognita.

We still don’t have a clear picture of the Sun’s physics — but the Solar Ring could change that.

To solve this a team of astronomers proposes the Solar Ring. The Solar Ring is a fleet of three spacecraft that will all orbit around the Sun. They will be separated from each other by 120 degrees and be fitted with identical instruments. This way their overlapping fields of view will make it impossible for us to miss anything happening on the surface.

Among the many kinds of observations that the astronomers behind the Solar Ring hope to perform, one involves a technique called reverberation mapping. By carefully mapping the velocity of gas on the surface of the Sun, they can measure vibrations and pulsations. These kinds of “sunquakes” give astronomers rich information about what is happening within deeper layers, much like how earthquakes tell us about the core and mantle of the Earth.

Continue reading “A trio of satellites could take a groundbreaking 360-degree photo of the sun” »

New technique could lead to clearer tests of whether this fundamental constant is truly constant.

Clues to a black hole’s origins can be found in the way it spins. This is especially true for binaries, in which two black holes circle close together before merging. The spin and tilt of the respective black holes just before they merge can reveal whether the invisible giants arose from a quiet galactic disk or a more dynamic cluster of stars.

Astronomers are hoping to tease out which of these origin stories is more likely by analyzing the 69 confirmed binaries detected to date. But a new study finds that for now, the current catalog of binaries is not enough to reveal anything fundamental about how black holes form.

In a study appearing today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, MIT physicists show that when all the known binaries and their spins are worked into models of black hole formation, the conclusions can look very different, depending on the particular model used to interpret the data.

Thanks to a cool physics trick, flares from a nearby star can heat a planet from the inside, powering plate tectonics.

What we call laws of physics are often just mathematical descriptions of some part of nature. Ultimate physical laws probably don’t exist and physics is all the better for it, says theoretical physicist Sankar Das Sarma.