Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: physics

A new technique uses the curious physical laws of the nano-scale itself to “program” nanobots. Welcome to the future of nanotechnology.

Nanorobotics has long been touted as one of the most promising “miracle technologies” of the future. But one of the fundamental problems with such extreme miniaturization is how to “program” nanobots—after all, you can’t very well shrink computer circuitry to fit within nanometer-scale technology.

But now, two researchers, Joseph Wang of UC San Diego and Jennifer Balazs of the University of Pittsburgh, may have found an ingenious way to circumvent this problem. Forget computer controls and artificial intelligence programming—let the laws of physics at the nano-scale do all the programming for you.

Read more

Albert Einstein was very clear in his day. Physicists are very clear now. Time is not absolute, despite what common sense tells you and me.

Time is relative, and flexible and, according to Einstein, “the dividing line between past, present, and future is an illusion”. So reality is ultimately TIMELESS. This sounds pretty bizarre from the view of classical physics, but from the view of consciousness theory and spirituality, it fits in perfectly.

Read more

A test cell for the National Spherical Torus Experiment Upgrade with tokamak in the center. (credit: Elle Starkman/PPPL Office of Communications)

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are building a “star in a jar” — a miniature version of the how our Sun creates energy through fusion. It could provide humankind with near limitless energy, ending dependence on fossil fuels for generating electricity — without contributing greenhouse gases that warm the Earth, and with no long-term radioactive waste.

But that requires a “jar” that can contain superhot plasma — and is low-cost enough to be built around the world. A model for such a “jar,” or fusion device, already exists in experimental form: the tokamak, or fusion reactor. Invented in the 1950s by Soviet physicists, it’s a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine plasma (superhot charged gas) in the shape of a torus.

Read more

New research published in the New Journal of Physics tries to decompose the structural layers of the cortical network to different hierarchies enabling to identify the network’s nucleus, from which our consciousness could emerge.

The is a very complex network, with approximately 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses between the neurons. In order to cope with its enormous complexity and to understand how brain function eventually creates the conscious mind, science uses advanced mathematical tools. Ultimately, scientists want to understand how a global phenomenon such as consciousness can emerge from our neuronal network.

A team of physicists from Bar Ilan University in Israel led by Professor Shlomo Havlin and Professor Reuven Cohen used network theory in order to deal with this complexity and to determine how the structure of the human cortical network can support complex data integration and . The gray area of the human cortex, the neuron cell bodies, were scanned with MRI imaging and used to form 1000 in the cortical network. The white matter of the human cortex, the neuron bundles, were scanned with DTI imaging, forming 15,000 links or edges that connected the network’s nodes. In the end of this process, their network was an approximation of the structure of the human cortex.

Read more

A team of Russian physicists has found a way to tune silicon nanoparticles so they can process optical data at previously unattainable speed, paving the way for the creation of “ultracompact and ultrafast” processing devices.

The findings of the experiment-based survey conducted by scientists from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and ITMO University were published in the ACS Photonics journal in late July.

Read more

It would provide humankind with near limitless energy, ending dependence on fossil fuels for generating electricity.

US Government physicists have backed plans to create ‘a star in a jar’ — replicating on Earth the way the sun and stars create energy through fusion.

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) revealed their plan for a next generation fusion device in a paper published in the journal Nuclear Fusion.

Read more

To check out any of the lectures available from Great Courses Plus go to http://ow.ly/Y8lm303oKJe

Get your own Space Time t­shirt at http://bit.ly/1QlzoBi

Tweet at us! @pbsspacetime
Facebook: facebook.com/pbsspacetime
Email us! pbsspacetime [at] gmail [dot] com.

Comment on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/pbsspacetime

The Kepler telescope recently noticed a strange partial eclipse that some have speculated could be a Dyson Sphere. Are Dyson Sphere’s possible? Are they practical? What other alternatives to futuristic energy capture do we have to choose from? Why not a kugelblitz — a swarm of black hole powered engines?

Previous Episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uzytrooz44

Read more