Newly discovered life forms inside our bodies profoundly affect our health – and provide a glimpse of the vast and mysterious biological “dark matter” within us.
This week’s podcast features an interview with Ray LaPierre, who heads up the department of engineering physics at McMaster University in Canada. Ray talks to fellow Canadian Hamish Johnston about his research in semiconductor nanowires, in particular for use in photonics and quantum computers, and also shares his experiences of working at JDS Uniphase during the telecoms boom.
Physics World’s Anna Demming also joins the podcast to describe a flurry of new results in the emerging field of twistronics – where two layers of graphene are stacked on top of each other but twisted at a slight angle to each other. The discovery last year that bilayer graphene can become a superconductor if the two graphene layers are twisted at the so-called magic angle of 1.1º won Physics World’s 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, and since then the race has been on to investigate other angle-dependent properties of twisted bilayer graphene. Anna describes how different research teams are now trying to work out what causes these intriguing effects.
We also talk to industry editor Margaret Harris about the importance of technology and engineering for scientific progress. Margaret shares her own “light-bulb” moment, when she realized that new laser technology could have saved hours of experimental time during her PhD, and also highlights several articles in the latest Physics World Focus on Instruments and Vacuum that highlight how breakthrough scientific discoveries rely on developments in the enabling technologies – including the first images of a black hole that were revealed in April.
Atish Dabholkar, a theoretical physicist from India, has been appointed as the new director of Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy.
He is currently the head of ICTP’s high energy, cosmology and astroparticle physics section. He joined the centre in 2014 on secondment from Sorbonne Université and the National Center for Scientific Research, where he has been a research director since 2007. Mr. Dabholkar will take up his duties as ICTP director with the rank of Assistant Director General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). He will succeed Fernando Quevedo, who has led the centre since 2009.
“It’s an honour and a great responsibility to be chosen as ICTP’s next director. ICTP is a one-of-a-kind institution with a very high level of research and a unique global mission for international cooperation through science. It was envisioned as an international hub for excellence in science and as an anchor to build scientific capacity and a culture of science around the globe. This vision remains valid today even after five decades, but needs to be implemented keeping in mind changing realities and priorities,” he said in a statement.
ISAAC NEWTON is rightly regarded as the greatest scientist of all time. However, groundbreaking black hole research has now disproved Newton’s theory of gravity – and even Albert Einstein’s theories are “starting to fray around the edges”, a scientist has warned.
I don’t use the term artificial gravity because, the gravity from a black hole is real.
If you have harnessed and are able to control a black hole would you be able to use it as portable gravity device?
I don’t really have the physics and the math to to figure it out. But it would seem that if you are in a low gravity environment, you could place a black hole under the floor, and have gravity. Presumably by changing the distance between the floor and the black hole you could adjust to 1 gravity or partial gravity.
Astrophysicists think they know how to destroy a black hole. The puzzle is what such destruction would leave behind.
Vera Rubin is shown here in 1974, analyzing data from different portions of a galaxy to ascertain its rotational properties. The discovery that the effects of gravity did not trace out the same path that the starlight does was one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century, and brought dark matter into the mainstream of science from the fringes, where it had languished for most of the 20th century. Her work changed our conception of the Universe forever.
You can amplify light by bouncing it between the horizons of a black hole and a white hole. Now physicists have worked out how to build such a device in the lab.
Making a replicator from this could make something that could create almost anything :3.
The first type of molecule that ever formed in the universe has been detected in space for the first time, after decades of searching. Scientists discovered its signature in our own galaxy using the world’s largest airborne observatory, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, as the aircraft flew high above the Earth’s surface and pointed its sensitive instruments out into the cosmos.
Continue reading “The Universe’s First Type of Molecule Is Found at Last” »
A vacuum is generally thought to be nothing but empty space. But in fact, a vacuum is filled with virtual particle-antiparticle pairs of electrons and positrons that are continuously created and annihilated in unimaginably short time-scales.
The quest for a better understanding of vacuum physics will lead to the elucidation of fundamental questions in modern physics, which is integral in unraveling the mysteries of space, such as the Big Bang. However, the laser intensity required to forcibly separate the virtual pairs and cause them to appear not as virtual particles but real particles would be 10 million times higher than current laser technology is capable of. This field intensity is the so-called Schwinger limit, named a half-century ago after the American Nobel laureate Julian Schwinger.
In 2018, scientists at Osaka University discovered a novel mechanism that they called a microbubble implosion (MBI). In MBIs, super-high-energy hydrogen ions (relativistic protons) are emitted at the moment when bubbles shrink to atomic size through the irradiation of hydrides with micron-sized spherical bubbles by ultraintense, ultrashort laser pulses.
