Lifeboat Foundation

It’s still just a plan, but a new telescope could soon be measuring gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are something like the sound waves of the universe. They are created, for example, when black holes or neutron stars collide.

The future gravitational wave detector, the Einstein Telescope, will use the latest laser technology to better understand these waves and, thus, our universe. One possible location for the construction of this telescope is the border triangle of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

What is gravity without mass? Both Newton’s revolutionary laws describing its universal effect and Einstein’s proposal of a dimpled spacetime, we’ve thought of gravity as exclusively within the domain of matter.

Now a wild new study suggesting that gravity can exist without mass, conveniently eliminating the need for one of the most elusive substances in our Universe: dark matter.

Dark matter is a hypothetical, invisible mass thought to make up 85 percent of the Universe’s total bulk. Originally devised to account for galaxies holding together under high speed rotation, it has yet to be directly observed, leading physicists to propose all sorts of out-there ideas to avoid invoking this elusive material as a way to plug the holes in current theories.

Accreting wormholes likely form “plasma tornadoes” in its throat while firing matter at one-fifth the speed of light.

University of Copenhagen astrophysicists help explain a mysterious phenomenon, whereby stars suddenly vanish from the night sky. Their study of an unusual binary star system has resulted in convincing evidence that massive stars can completely collapse and become black holes without a supernova explosion.

One day, the star at the center of our own solar system, the Sun, will begin to expand until it engulfs Earth. It will then become increasingly unstable until it eventually contracts into a small and dense object known as a white dwarf.

However, if the Sun were of a weight class roughly eight times greater or more, it would probably go out with a huge bang — as a supernova. Its collapse would culminate into an explosion, ejecting energy and mass into space with enormous force, prior to leaving behind a neutron star or a black hole in its wake.

When molecules are irradiated with infrared light, they begin to vibrate due to the energy supply. For Andreas Hauser from the Institute of Experimental Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), this well-known phenomenon was the starting point for considering whether these oscillations could also be used to generate magnetic fields.

A trio of physicists at Sorbonne Université, in France, has observed a thermoelectric effect between two liquid materials for the first time. In their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Marlone Vernet, Stephan Fauve and Christophe Gissinger put two types of liquid metals together at room temperature and subjected them to a heat gradient.

Theory has become practice as new work from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering taps diamond defects’ remarkable ability to concentrate optical energy.

Researchers have developed atomic antennas using germanium vacancy centers in diamonds, achieving a million-fold optical energy enhancement. This advancement allows the study of fundamental physics and opens new research avenues. The collaboration between theoretical and experimental teams was essential to this breakthrough.

Atomic antennas: harnessing light for powerful signals.

If you are a fan of reading or watching science fiction, you have definitely encountered the concept of curvature propulsion — one of the most fascinating and speculative frontiers in theoretical physics and advanced space travel.

Rooted in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it proposes innovative methods to manipulate spacetime itself to achieve faster-than-light travel without violating the laws of physics.

General relativity, formulated by Albert Einstein, provides the theoretical foundation for curvature propulsion. This theory describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy.

While researchers have long studied brain dynamics using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalograms (EEG), advances in neuroscience have only recently provided massive datasets for the brain’s cellular structure. These data opened possibilities for Kovács and his team to apply statistical physics techniques to measure the physical structure of neurons.

For the new study, Kovács and Ansell analyzed publicly available data of 3D brain reconstructions from humans, fruit flies and mice. By examining the brain at nanoscale resolution, the researchers found the samples showcased hallmarks of physical properties associated with criticality.

One such property is the well-known, fractal-like structure of neurons. This nontrivial fractal-dimension is an example of a set of observables, called “critical exponents,” that emerge when a system is close to a phase transition.