Physicists have just created the first-ever time quasicrystal, a new phase of matter that appears to defy concepts of time and motion.
Category: physics – Page 4
Complex materials such as organic semiconductors or the microporous metal-organic frameworks known as MOFs are already being used for numerous applications such as OLED displays, solar cells, gas storage and water extraction. Nevertheless, they still harbor a few secrets. One of these has so far been a detailed understanding of how they transport thermal energy.
Egbert Zojer’s research team at the Institute of Solid State Physics at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz), in collaboration with colleagues from TU Vienna and the University of Cambridge, has now cracked this secret using the example of organic semiconductors, opening up new perspectives for the development of innovative materials with customized thermal properties.
The team has published its findings in npj Computational Materials.
AI gives a thumbs up to Brett Bellmore innovative modifications to Robert Zubrin’s Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR). Switching from water to polyethene and storing in sausage strings could enhance its performance and safety, particularly focusing on avoiding criticality during storage, minimizing parasitic mass, and addressing practical challenges like micrometeorite protection and fuel state.
Robert Zubrin’s Nuclear Salt Water Rocket (NSWR) design is a rocket that uses known physics and engineering. My previous analysis shows that the first working prototype might be made in space with a 10–20 year development program for 10–30 billion. There are versions that could reach 7–8% of light speed. The use of low grade uranium enrichment for a more near term version is the one that is often described. However, if weapons grade uranium (90% enrichment) is used then he exhaust would be at 1.575% of the speed of light. A 30,000 ton ice asteroid and 7,500 tons of uranium could propel a 300 ton payload including a crew to 7.62% of light speed.
One of key parts of the engineering is to use water to protect the nozzle from the intense heat of the system. A combination of the coatings and space between the pipes would prevent the solution from reaching critical mass until it was pumped into a reaction chamber. It would reach critical mass and it being expelled through a nozzle to generate thrust. The nozzle would be protected by running water.
Download Star Trek Fleet Command for FREE now here: https://bit.ly/3XYvSJ2 to support my channel, and enter the promo code VOYAGER30 to unlock Neelix, the morale officer from Voyager FREE.
Dr. Clément Vidal joins John Michael Godier to discuss his new paper on the Spider Stellar Engine, a hypothetical form of stellar propulsion using binary pulsar systems. The conversation explores how such systems could serve as **technosignatures**, the philosophy of post-biological civilizations, and the potential for advanced beings to manipulate entire stars or even create new universes.
Vidal, C. 2024. “The Spider Stellar Engine: A Fully Steerable Extraterrestrial Design?” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 77 : 156–66. doi:10.59332/jbis-077–05-0156. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05038.
Vidal, C. 2019. “Pulsar Positioning System: A Quest for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Engineering.” International Journal of Astrobiology 18 : 213–34. doi:10.1017/S147355041700043X. https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03316.
Delahaye, J. P., and C. Vidal. 2018. “Organized Complexity: Is Big History a Big Computation?” American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Philosophy and Computers 17 : 49–54. http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.07111.
#EventHorizon #SETI #Technosignatures #Astrophysics #StellarEngines #FermiParadox #ExtraterrestrialLife #Pulsars #SpaceExploration #PhilosophyOfScience #cosmology.
The symbols and mathematical operations used in the laws of physics follow a pattern that could reveal something fundamental about the universe
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is mapping millions of celestial objects to better understand dark energy—the mysterious driver of our universe’s accelerating expansion. Today, the DESI collaboration released a new collection of data for anyone in the world to investigate.
The dataset is the largest of its kind, with information on 18.7 million objects: roughly 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars (extremely bright but distant objects powered by supermassive black holes at their cores).
While the experiment’s main mission is illuminating dark energy, DESI’s Data Release 1 (DR1) could yield discoveries in other areas of astrophysics, such as the evolution of galaxies and black holes, the nature of dark matter, and the structure of the Milky Way.
A trio of physicists from Princeton University, CIT’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Spectral Sensor Solutions, all in the U.S., is proposing the possibility of generating electricity using energy from the rotation of the Earth. In their study, published in the journal Physical Review Research, Christopher Chyba, Kevin Hand and Thomas Chyba tested a theory that electricity could be generated from the Earth’s rotation using a special device that interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field.
Over the past decade, members of the team have been toying with the idea of generating electricity using the Earth’s rotation and its magnetic field, and they even published a paper describing the possibility back in 2016. That paper was met with criticism because prior theories have suggested that doing so would be impossible because any voltage created by such a device would be canceled as the electrons rearrange themselves during the generation of an electric field.
The researchers wondered what would happen if this cancelation was prevented and the voltage was instead captured. To find out, they built a special device consisting of a cylinder made of manganese-zinc ferrite, a weak conductor, which served as a magnetic shield. They then oriented the cylinder in a north-south direction set at a 57° angle. That made it perpendicular to both the Earth’s rotational motion and the Earth’s magnetic field.
NVIDIA has just unveiled the Isaac GR00T N1, a foundation model that is revolutionizing humanoid robotics. This AI-driven system can learn tasks, make decisions, and adapt like never before!
At GTC 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed the Isaac GR00T N1, a next-generation AI model designed to train humanoid robots with unprecedented efficiency. It uses a dual-system approach—one for instant reactions and another for strategic thinking. NVIDIA also introduced Newton, a physics engine developed in collaboration with Google DeepMind and Disney, aiming to enhance robotic motion.
Additionally, NVIDIA’s Isaac GR00T Blueprint enables large-scale training with synthetic data. In just 11 hours, the system generated over 780,000 training examples, drastically improving robot accuracy. These advancements could reshape industries by making humanoid robots more intelligent and useful in real-world applications.
What do you think of NVIDIA’s latest robotics breakthrough? Let us know in the comments! Do not forget to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications for more updates on AI and robotics.
#NVIDIA #AI #Robotics.
Get More Great Car Videos — Subscribe: https://goo.gl/BSIaFc
In a fun experiment, Max Koch, a researcher at the University of Göttingen in Germany—who also happens to be passionate about homebrewing—decided to use a high-speed camera to capture what occurs while opening a swing-top bottle of homebrew.
When Robert Mettin, who leads the Ultrasound and Cavitation group at the university’s Third Institute of Physics, Biophysics, suggested that Koch should submit the findings to the special “kitchen flows” issue of Physics of Fluids, Koch and his colleagues chose to expand on the home experiment and delve into the novel acoustics and physics at play.
The group found that the sound emitted by opening a pressurized bottle with a swing-top lid isn’t a single shockwave, but rather a very quick “ah” sound. Their high-speed video recordings captured condensation within the bottleneck that vibrated up and down in a standing wave.
A curiosity about tiny dots on a germanium wafer with metal films led to the discovery of intricate spiral patterns etched by a chemical reaction. Further experiments revealed that these patterns emerge from chemical reactions interacting with mechanical forces through a deforming catalyst. This breakthrough marks the most significant advance in studying chemical pattern formation since the 1950s. Understanding these complex systems could shed light on natural processes like crack formation in materials and the effects of stress on biological growth.
University of California, Los Angeles doctoral student Yilin Wong noticed tiny dots appearing on one of her samples, which had been accidentally left out overnight. The layered sample consisted of a germanium wafer topped with evaporated metal films in contact with a drop of water. On a whim, she examined the dots under a microscope and couldn’t believe her eyes. Beautiful spiral patterns had been etched into the germanium surface by a chemical reaction.
Wong’s curiosity led her on a journey of discovery, revealing something never seen before: hundreds of nearly identical spiral patterns spontaneously forming on a centimeter-square germanium chip. Even more remarkably, small changes in experimental parameters, such as the thickness of the metal film, produced different patterns, including Archimedean spirals, logarithmic spirals, lotus flower shapes, radially symmetric patterns, and more.