Lifeboat Foundation

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren’t bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don’t exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place. The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Mersini-Houghton. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

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This is the energy source that will power the Singularity.

And everything else, too.

Continue reading “Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy” »

Abstract: Physicists of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich shorten electron pulses down to 30 femtoseconds duration. This enables them to gain detailed insight into atomic motions in molecules.

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In a study published today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists from the University of New Hampshire and colleagues answer the question of why NASA’s Voyager 1, when it became the first probe to enter interstellar space in mid-2012, observed a magnetic field that was inconsistent with that derived from other spacecraft observations.

Voyager 1 sent back several different indications that it had punched through the edge of our sun’s massive protective bubble inflated by solar wind—the heliosphere—after a 35-year journey. But the magnetic field data gathered by the spacecraft was not what scientists had expected to see. The UNH-led study resolves the inconsistencies.

“There are still naysayers out there regarding Voyager 1 crossing through the heliopause—the edge of the heliosphere,” says astrophysicist Nathan Schwadron of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of physics and lead author of the paper. “And the reason for this doubt is that when the spacecraft supposedly broke through the heliopause we should have seen some sort of distinctive shift in the magnetic field from one medium to the other,” Schwadron says.

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Site — http://goo.gl/oORnr
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Genre: docudrama
Type: documentary
Year: 2011
Director: Misha Kostrov
Creative director: Eugene Sannikov
Producer: Victor Mirsky, Sergey Sozanovsky
Creative producer: Oksana Maidanskaya
Director of photography: Vladimir Kratinov
Scriptwriter: Nataliya Doilnitsyna
Аwards: Platinum Remi Award, WorldFest Houston 2013

The film tacks together two tales: a historical account of Tesla’s eventful life and his pioneering research into physics and bold experiments with electricity.

Continue reading “Free energy of Tesla. Film (Dubbed into English)” »

A team of physicists led by Caltech’s David Hsieh has discovered an unusual form of matter—not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different. This phase, characterized by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for new electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a long-standing mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivity—the ability for some materials to conduct electricity without resistance, even at “high” temperatures approaching −100 degrees Celsius.

“The discovery of this phase was completely unexpected and not based on any prior theoretical prediction,” says Hsieh, an assistant professor of physics, who previously was on a team that discovered another form of matter called a topological insulator. “The whole field of electronic materials is driven by the discovery of new phases, which provide the playgrounds in which to search for new macroscopic physical properties.”

Hsieh and his colleagues describe their findings in the November issue of Nature Physics, and the paper is now available online. Liuyan Zhao, a postdoctoral scholar in Hsieh’s group, is lead author on the paper.

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Randall Munroe is the author of What If: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, published in September.

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It is hard, sometimes, to understand why anyone would waste time on a problem as academic as black hole information loss. And I say that as someone who spent a significant part of the last decade pushing this very problem around in my head. Don’t physicists have anything better to do, in a world that is suffering from war and disease, bad grammar even? What drives these researchers, other than the hope to make headlines for solving a 40 years old conundrum?

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Positrons are plentiful in ultra-intense laser blasts

Physicists from Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have found a new recipe for using intense lasers to create positrons — the antiparticle of electrons — in record numbers and density.

In a series of experiments described recently in the online journal Scientific Reports published by Nature, the researchers used UT’s Texas Petawatt Laser to make large number of positrons by blasting tiny gold and platinum targets.

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