Lifeboat Foundation

No aliens yet, but we’ve learned a lot.

One year ago, Franck Marchis wrote an article about the remarkable discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system. Here’s an update.

NASA wants to send a space submarine to Saturn’s largest moon in hopes that it will bring us one step closer to discovering alien life.

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Forget the trial and error — mathematics has proved where the best spot to place your router is.

Physicist Jason Cole has figured out a formula that can work out the best place to position your wireless router, and it ultimately depends on your house’s floor plan.

Continue reading “A Physicist Has Calculated The Best Place to Put Your Router” »

From tunneling through impenetrable barriers to being in two places at the same time, the quantum world of atoms and particles is famously bizarre. Yet the strange properties of quantum mechanics are not mathematical quirks—they are real effects that have been seen in laboratories over and over.

One of the most iconic features of quantum mechanics is “entanglement”—describing particles that are mysteriously linked regardless of how far away from each other they are. Now three independent European research groups have managed to entangle not just a pair of particles, but separated clouds of thousands of atoms. They’ve also found a way to harness their technological potential.

When particles are entangled they share properties in a way that makes them dependent on each other, even when they are separated by large distances. Einstein famously called entanglement “spooky action at a distance,” as altering one particle in an entangled pair affects its twin instantaneously—no matter how far away it is.

Continue reading “A new physics discovery could change the game for quantum computing” »

Could an aid in fighting heart disease be waiting on the shelves on your local grocery store? New research suggests you may be in luck.

As if it’s not bad enough that bacteria are increasingly becoming resistant to our best antibiotics – some bugs are even eating the drugs. An international team of scientists has now examined just how the bacteria disarm and consume the antibiotics as food, uncovering new potential ways to fight back against resistance.

Bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics at an alarming rate, thanks to overprescription and overuse. If left unchecked, reports suggest that by 2050 the so-called superbugs could be responsible for up to 10 million deaths a year, ushering in a new dark age of medicine where our drugs simply don’t work.

Adding insult to injury, some species of bacteria flaunt their resistance by actually chowing down on antibiotics. New research out of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has set out to examine just how the bacteria manage to do this.

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This concrete can heal itself, saving billions in construction costs.

What could go wrong?

If the world is going to end, why not have it be for a ridiculous, insane reason?

Like, say, building nuclear power plants on top of a barge and sending it floating up to the Arctic?

Continue reading “Russia Has Launched a Floating Nuclear Power Plant Critics Are Calling ‘Nuclear Titanic’” »

Research appearing today in Nature Communications finds useful new information-handling potential in samples of tin(II) sulfide (SnS), a candidate “valleytronics” transistor material that might one day enable chipmakers to pack more computing power onto microchips.

The research was led by Jie Yao of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Shuren Lin of UC Berkeley’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and included scientists from Singapore and China. Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Foundry, a DOE Office of Science user facility, contributed to the work.

For several decades, improvements in conventional transistor materials have been sufficient to sustain Moore’s Law — the historical pattern of microchip manufacturers packing more transistors (and thus more information storage and handling capacity) into a given volume of silicon. Today, however, chipmakers are concerned that they might soon reach the fundamental limits of conventional materials. If they can’t continue to pack more transistors into smaller spaces, they worry that Moore’s Law would break down, preventing future circuits from becoming smaller and more powerful than their predecessors.