Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: physics

For every star performing biotech, life sciences or innovative 3D printing company there are another 9 where investors would have been better off keeping their cash under a mattress.

As Organovo report their first full year operating on a commercial basis we look for clues as to which category they might fit into. With more than 25 patents secured and another 80 pending, does the current share price and today’s published financial accounts tell the full story?

Organovo increased total revenue from $570 thousand in 2015 to $1.5 million for 2016. However, losses also increased from $30.8 million to $38.6 million. Although yet to turn a profit, Organovo were always going to generate a sizeable amount of text in the 3D Printing media and beyond. The promise of combining biophysics, developmental biology and of course 3D printing to advance healthcare and life sciences is an attractive proposition.

Read more

Theoretical physicists have confirmed that it’s not just the information coded into our DNA that shapes who we are — it’s also the way DNA folds itself that controls which genes are expressed inside our bodies.

That’s something biologists have known for years, and they’ve even been able to figure out some of the proteins responsible for folding up DNA. But now a group of physicists have been able to demonstrate for the first time through simulations how this hidden information controls our evolution.

Let’s back up for a second here, because although it’s not necessarily news to many scientists, this second level of DNA information might not be something you’re familiar with.

Read more

Edwin E Klingman, [email protected]

PO Box 3000, San Gregorio CA 94074

Abstract.

Because every physical theory assumes something, that basic assumption will deter­mine what is ultimately possible in that physics. The assumed thing itself will likely be unexplained. This essay will assume one thing, a primordial field, to explain current physics and its many current mysteries. The derivation of physics from this entity is surprisingly straightforward and amazingly broad in its implications.

Read more

The fact that the speed of light in a vacuum is a constant is one of the cornerstones of physics, but scientists from the Philippines were able to add a twist to this tenet. And I mean it literally!

By changing how some light beams rotate, the researchers from the National Institute of Physics were able to slow down light in a vacuum. The physicists used circularly symmetric light beams, known as Laguerre-Gauss beams, to change the way light twists around itself. Suddenly, the light beams were propagating more slowly.

The speed of light varies when it moves through different materials, and it does so at the expense of accuracy in transmitting information. For this reason, more and more people are interested in ways of manipulating the speed of light without affecting accuracy.

Read more

A 3D hydrogel biochip, a new way of detecting colorectal cancer in the early stages, has been discovered by the scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The announcement was made in time for the upcoming conference of the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Like Us on Facebook

The 3D hydrogel biochip will be using antibodies to determine the CRC specific glycans that emerge in the earliest stages of cancer, with the hope of improving today’s survival rates. These biochips are 3D cells consisting of a special gel that has molecular probes. Based on reports, the physical feature of the gel is an optimal form for running tests. The Russian scientists were able to develop a method that can calculate the concentration of antibodies-to-glycans in the patient’s blood. This means that combining the biochips into a patient’s blood sample will give the mot precise results.

Read more

If anything can sum up just how little we truly know about the Universe, it’s black holes.

We can’t see them because not even light can escape their gravitational pull, we have no idea what they’re made of, and where does everything inside go once a black hole dies?

Physicists can’t even agree on whether black holes are massive, three-dimensional behemoths, or just two-dimensional surfaces that are projected in 3D just like a hologram.

Read more

(Phys.org)—For more than 100 years, scientists have debated the question: when light travels through a medium such as oil or water, does it pull or push on the medium? While most experiments have found that light exerts a pulling pressure, in a new paper physicists have, for the first time, found evidence that light exerts a pushing pressure.

The scientists suggest that this apparent contradiction is not a fundamental one, but can be explained by the interplay between the light and the fluid medium: if the light can put the fluid in motion, it exerts a pushing force; if not, it exerts a pulling force.

The researchers, Li Zhang, Weilong She, and Nan Peng at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, and Ulf Leonhardt at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have published a paper on the first evidence for the pushing of light in a recent issue of the New Journal of Physics.

Read more

New fundamental research by UT Dallas physicists may accelerate the drive toward more advanced electronics and more powerful computers.

The scientists are investigating materials called topological insulators, whose surface electrical properties are essentially the opposite of the properties inside.

“These materials are made of the same thing throughout, from the interior to the exterior,” said Dr. Fan Zhang, assistant professor of physics at UT Dallas. “But, the interior does not conduct electrons — it’s an insulator — while the electrons on the surface are free to move around. The surface is therefore a conductor, like a metal, but it is in fact more robust than a metal.”

Read more

Interesting…

First, we take ‘Time’, as we know it’s one of those things that we take for granted—time moves forward and never backward. But did you ever stop to wonder why it moves in one direction, as opposed to the other?

The question continues to stump physicists. After all, there are certain physical processes that are actually time-reversible—they look the same no matter which way you run them.

For example, gravity operates the same way regardless of Time’s Arrow; a planet will orbit a star in exactly the same way, just with the direction of that orbit reversed. But there is one aspect of the universe that is dependent on the direction of Time’s Arrow: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that the disorder of a closed system (such as our universe) must increase, never decrease.

It’s commonly called “entropy,” and it’s why broken eggs don’t suddenly reassemble themselves, or why dead things don’t suddenly come back to life. Disorganization and chaos are downhill, order and complexity are uphill; complex systems like stars and planets and human beings may emerge locally, but they require an inordinate amount of energy to create, which only increases the overall entropy of the system.

This is why the Second Law of Thermodynamics is universally reckoned as the mechanism that imparts directionality to time—although, understanding the how of a thing is not the same as understanding the why of it.

Now, we see the connection of Dark Energy,
In the question to understand the origins of Time’s Arrow, two Armenian physicists, A. E. Allahverdyan and V. G. Gurzadyan, decided to search for a link between so-called “dark energy” and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Dark energy is a mysterious quantity that is proposed as an explanation for why the universe is continuing to expand, rather than decelerating and collapsing, as our current understanding of gravity dictates it should.

Read more