Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: particle physics

Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, MBA’07, invests in bold ventures on the next frontier.

Bryan Johnson is determined to explore the depths of your mind and help save humanity from its direst threats.

“The biggest revolutions that have happened over the past couple of decades have largely been done on silicon—the transistors we build, the computers we have, the internet, our smartphones,” said Johnson, MBA’07. “The next great revolutions will be evolving our cognition and predictably engineering atoms, molecules, organisms and complex systems.”

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When mysterious glowing stripes of green lit up Finnish skies in 2018, it didn’t go unnoticed by avid aurora chasers. The pattern of light was unfamiliar and strangely perfect, reaching out toward the horizon like a set of celestial sand dunes.

Sure enough, the light show dubbed by the citizen scientists as “the dunes” turned out to be a new type of aurora. This aurora is formed by the dramatic dance of gravity waves and oxygen atoms, according to new findings published today (Jan. 29) in the journal AGU Advances.

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On 12. June 2013 the third test fire of the DHX-200 “Aurora” hybrid rocket motor took place at the facilities of TNO. The Aurora motor will power the Stratos II rocket and utilizes nitrous oxide as oxidizer and a fuel combination of sorbitol, paraffin wax, and aluminium particles as fuel.
The motor was intended to be fired for 15 seconds after the successful 10 second test earlier this day but was shutdown prematurely at around 6 seconds after the combustion chamber showed local structural failure.
The sequence involves the following steps:

T — 4s : Nitrous Oxide bypass flow initiated
T — 3s : Ignition pulse for pyrotechnic igniter
T 0s : Main valve open
T + 6s : Main valve closed (safety precaution)
T + 15s : Scheduled motor cut-off

Read the full story on: http://projectstratos.nl/2013/06/2011/

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Essentially the higgs mode is like a developer mode for materials and even physics by itself. It could make metals that are as light as a feather but essentially as strong as a universe. It could make essentially near infinitely strong metals that could be put on spaceships to handle all manners of energy blasts. Even weird things could happen where like even changing dimension al physics of areas. Essentially a near cartoon like physics or even prove the existence of the stranger things dimension really happened. Even keep out other dimensions from entering our universe. Even controlling the universe itself by healing it. Essentially like it could allow the monitor from halo kinda developer mode to modify gravity or all variables or even bring new variables into the dimension.

Condensed-matter analogues of the Higgs boson in particle physics allow insights into its behaviour in different symmetries and dimensionalities1. Evidence for the Higgs mode has been reported in a number of different settings, including ultracold atomic gases2, disordered superconductors3, and dimerized quantum magnets4. However, decay processes of the Higgs mode (which are eminently important in particle physics) have not yet been studied in condensed matter due to the lack of a suitable material system coupled to a direct experimental probe. A quantitative understanding of these processes is particularly important for low-dimensional systems, where the Higgs mode decays rapidly and has remained elusive to most experimental probes. Here, we discover and study the Higgs mode in a two-dimensional antiferromagnet using spin-polarized inelastic neutron scattering. Our spin-wave spectra of Ca2RuO4 directly reveal a well-defined, dispersive Higgs mode, which quickly decays into transverse Goldstone modes at the antiferromagnetic ordering wavevector. Through a complete mapping of the transverse modes in the reciprocal space, we uniquely specify the minimal model Hamiltonian and describe the decay process. We thus establish a novel condensed-matter platform for research on the dynamics of the Higgs mode.

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A new method for manipulating the quantum state of particles could one day allow us to observe an object in two places at once. The technique has been used to chill a tiny glass bead into its coldest possible quantum state.

Once you get down to extremely small scales, heat and motion are interchangeable: the more a particle is moving, the hotter it is. So to cool down a small particle, you have to stop it moving. Because the rules of quantum mechanics mean you can never know exactly how fast a particle is moving, there is a limit to how cold a particle can get. When a particle is at that limit, we call it the particle’s ground state.

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Russian scientists have proposed a concept of a thorium hybrid reactor in that obtains additional neutrons using high-temperature plasma held in a long magnetic trap. This project was applied in close collaboration between Tomsk Polytechnic University, All-Russian Scientific Research Institute Of Technical Physics (VNIITF), and Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS. The proposed thorium hybrid reactor is distinguished from today’s nuclear reactors by moderate power, relatively compact size, high operational safety, and a low level of radioactive waste.

“At the initial stage, we get relatively cold using special plasma guns. We retain the amount by deuterium gas injection. The injected neutral beams with particle energy of 100 keV into this plasma generate the high-energy deuterium and tritium ions and maintain the required temperature. Colliding with each other, deuterium and tritium ions are combined into a helium nucleus so high-energy neutrons are released. These neutrons can freely pass through the walls of the vacuum chamber, where the plasma is held by a magnetic field, and entering the area with nuclear fuel. After slowing down, they support the fission of heavy nuclei, which serves as the main source of energy released in the hybrid ,” says professor Andrei Arzhannikov, a chief researcher of Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics of SB RAS.

The main advantage of a hybrid nuclear fusion reactor is the simultaneous use of the fission reaction of heavy nuclei and synthesis of light ones. It minimizes the disadvantages of applying these nuclear reactions separately.

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There’s a good reason why we need to take a closer look at the sun. When the solar atmosphere releases its magnetic energy, it results in explosive phenomena like solar flares that hurl ultra-energized particles through the solar system in all directions, including ours. This […] can wreak havoc on things like GPS and electrical grids. Learning more about solar activity could give us more notice of when hazardous space weather is due to hit.

You can see structures on the surface as small as 18.5 miles in size.

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After decades of not happening, fusion power finally appears to be maybe possibly happening.

The joke has been around almost as long as the dream: Nuclear fusion energy is 30 years away…and always will be. But now, more than 80 years after Australian physicist Mark Oliphant first observed deuterium atoms fusing and releasing dollops of energy, it may finally be time to update the punch line.

Over the past several years, more than two dozen research groups—impressively staffed and well-funded startups, university programs, and corporate projects—have achieved eye-opening advances in controlled nuclear fusion. They’re building fusion reactors based on radically different designs that challenge the two mainstream approaches, which use either a huge, doughnut-shaped magnetic vessel called a tokamak or enormously powerful lasers.

What’s more, some of these groups are predicting significant fusion milestones within the next five years, including reaching the breakeven point at which the energy produced surpasses the energy used to spark the reaction. That’s shockingly soon, considering that the mainstream projects pursuing the conventional tokamak and laser-based approaches have been laboring for decades and spent billions of dollars without achieving breakeven.

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