Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists at West Virginia University have overcome a long-standing limitation of the first law of thermodynamics.

Paul Cassak, a professor and associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics at West Virginia University, and Hasan Barbhuiya, a graduate research assistant in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, are investigating the conversion of energy in superheated plasmas in space. Funded by the National Science Foundation, their findings, published in the Physical Review Letters journal, are set to revolutionize the understanding of how plasmas in space and labs are heated and could have far-reaching implications in physics and other sciences.

In 2018, a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara proposed a method for creating Kerr-Newman black holes using lasers. However, this method has not yet been tested experimentally.

The team of scientists, led by Philip Gibbs, proposed to create Kerr-Newman black holes by colliding two high-energy laser beams. The collision would create a plasma that would be compressed and heated to extreme temperatures, creating a black hole.

Abstract

Continue reading “How a Laser Physics Induced Kerr-Newman Black Hole Can Release Gravitational Waves without Igniting the Black Hole Bomb (Explosion of a Mini Black Hole in a Laboratory)” »

10 SpaceX Starships are carrying 120 robots to Mars. They are the first to colonize the Red Planet. Building robot habitats to protect themselves, and then landing pads, structures, and the life support systems for the humans who will soon arrive.

This Mars colonization mini documentary also covers they type of robots that will be building on Mars, the solar fields, how Elon Musk and Tesla could have a battery bank station at the Mars colony, and how the Martian colony expands during the 2 years when the robots are building. Known as the Robotic Age of Mars.

Continue reading “THE FIRST 2 YEARS ON MARS (Prequel) Timelapse” »

Many scientific problems can be formulated as sparse regression, i.e., regression onto a set of parameters when there is a desire or expectation that some of the parameters are exactly zero or do not substantially contribute. This includes many problems in signal and image processing, system identification, optimization, and parameter estimation methods such as Gaussian process regression. Sparsity facilitates exploring high-dimensional spaces while finding parsimonious and interpretable solutions. In the present work, we illustrate some of the important ways in which sparse regression appears in plasma physics and point out recent contributions and remaining challenges to solving these problems in this field. A brief review is provided for the optimization problem and the state-of-the-art solvers, especially for constrained and high-dimensional sparse regression.

Researchers have attained a 100-fold increase in the accuracy of a molecular clock that could serve as a terahertz-frequency standard and as a platform for investigating new physics.

Physics-Astronomy: Home of the best science(focusing physics, astronomy) and technology news since 2012. Keep up with the latest news via email or social media. We are curious about the Universe, are you?

Echopraxia is a book set in one of the most interesting sci-fi universes that I have covered on this channel. It is technically a sequel to Blindsight, but it is not necessary that you read Blindsight to understand Echopraxia is set in the late 21 century. About 14 years after man’s first contact with alien life.

This book brings up one of the most interesting concepts I’ve ever encountered in any sci-fi book ever. And that is the concept of the “Digital Universe” and God as a Virus. Now this is a concept that comes from the field of digital physics, which keep in mind is all theoretical. It is based on the premise that the universe is pure mathematics at its base, every event that occurs can be thought of as a kind of computation. This could mean that the universe is a simulation, but that is not necessary for the idea to work.

Continue reading “Is God A Virus? | Echopraxia” »

Cambridge researchers have discovered a new topological phase in a two-dimensional system, which could be used as a new platform for exploring topological physics in nanoscale devices.

Two-dimensional materials such as graphene have served as a playground for the experimental discovery and theoretical understanding of a wide range of phenomena in physics and materials science. Beyond graphene, there are a large number 2D materials, all with different physical properties. This is promising for potential applications in nanotechnology, where a wide range of functionality can be achieved in devices by using different 2D materials or stacking combinations of different layers.

It was recently discovered that in materials such as hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), which are less symmetric than graphene, ferroelectricity occurs when one layer slides over the other and breaks a symmetry. Ferroelectricity is the switching of a material’s electric dipole moment with an electric field, which is a useful property for information processing and memory storage.

The first possible scenarios for life’s origin is that life may simply have been a miracle. It may have been a divine act of intervention. If so, then the origin of life is not a scientific question. There is no experiment one can propose or an observation one can make.

Yet, it’s equally possible that the origin of life was an event that’s fully consistent with the known laws of physics and chemistry, but an extremely improbable, perhaps unique event; perhaps an event that only took place on Earth. Once again, it’s really not amenable to scientific study, because we can’t go into the laboratory and study a unique event.

And then there is a third possibility, and that’s that life is an inevitable consequence of chemistry. That, given an appropriate environment—an appropriate planet with water, for example—and sufficient time, that life always arises.