Lifeboat Foundation

Applied Materials CEO Gary Dickerson’s formula for success isn’t magic. “Being close to the customer,” he said, is the lesson that’s guided him.

Nature’s strongest material now has some stiff competition. For the first time, researchers have hard evidence that human-made hexagonal diamonds are stiffer than the common cubic diamonds found in nature and often used in jewelry.

Named for their six-sided crystal structure, hexagonal diamonds have been found at some meteorite impact sites, and others have been made briefly in labs, but these were either too small or had too short of an existence to be measured.

Now scientists at Washington State University’s Institute for Shock Physics created hexagonal diamonds large enough to measure their stiffness using sound waves. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper in Physical Review B.

A pair of researchers with Indiana University and Illinois University, respectively, has developed a theory that suggests crystalizing uranium “snowflakes” deep inside white dwarfs could instigate an explosion large enough to destroy the star. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, C. J. Horowitz and M. E. Caplan describe their theory and what it could mean to astrophysical theories about white dwarfs and supernovas.

White dwarfs are small stars that have burned up most of their nuclear fuel—they are typically much cooler than they once were and are very dense. In this new effort, Horowitz and Caplan used data from the Gaia space observatory to theorize that sometimes small grains of uranium could begin to crystalize (due to enriched actinides), forming what they describe as snowflakes. They suggest this could happen because of the differing melting points of the material involved. They further suggest that if this were to occur, it could lead to splitting of atomic nuclei, resulting in a series of fission reactions as the solids become enriched in actinides. And if such reactions were to raise the temperature of the interior of the star by igniting carbon, the result would likely be merging of atomic nuclei and eventually a very large fusion reaction that would result in a large explosion—likely large enough to destroy the star.

“Whooshes of creation” may be producing multiverses at this moment, says astronomer.

The cosmic inflation credited with creating the homogeneous universe which we now enjoy was likely not a one-off event, University of California, Berkeley astronomer Alexei Filippenko, told me. In fact, these ‘whooshes of creation’ may be producing multiverses even at this moment, says Filippenko.

The idea of an exponential, faster-than-light expansion of the early universe, was first put forth by MIT astrophysicist Alan Guth in 1981. And today, Inflation theory is used to explain the Cosmos’ current size, expansion, homogeneity and the fact that it appears to be geometrically flat, I noted in a 2011 issue of Astronomy magazine.

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Radio observations of a cold, dense cloud of molecular gas reveal more than a dozen unexpected molecules.

Scientists have discovered a vast, previously unknown reservoir of new aromatic material in a cold, dark molecular cloud by detecting individual polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules in the interstellar medium for the first time, and in doing so are beginning to answer a three-decades-old scientific mystery: how and where are these molecules formed in space?

“We had always thought polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were primarily formed in the atmospheres of dying stars,” said Brett McGuire, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Project Principal Investigator for GOTHAM, or Green Bank Telescope (GBT) Observations of TMC-1: Hunting Aromatic Molecules. “In this study, we found them in cold, dark clouds where stars haven’t even started forming yet.”

A new technique for making 3D printed organs uses hydrogels and lasers to print at speeds 50 times faster than conventional methods.

The recent synthesis of one-dimensional van der Waals heterostructures, a type of heterostructure made by layering two-dimensional materials that are one atom thick, may lead to new, miniaturized electronics that are currently not possible, according to a team of Penn State and University of Tokyo researchers.

Engineers commonly produce heterostructures to achieve new device properties that are not available in a single material. A van der Waals heterostructure is one made of 2D materials that are stacked directly on top of each other like Lego-blocks or a sandwich. The van der Waals force, which is an attractive force between uncharged molecules or atoms, holds the materials together.

According to Slava V. Rotkin, Penn State Frontier Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics, the one-dimensional van der Waals heterostructure produced by the researchers is different from the van der Waals heterostructures engineers have produced thus far.

For decades, there has been a trend in microelectronics towards ever smaller and more compact transistors. 2D materials such as graphene are seen as a beacon of hope here: they are the thinnest material layers that can possibly exist, consisting of only one or a few atomic layers. Nevertheless, they can conduct electrical currents—conventional silicon technology, on the other hand, no longer works properly if the layers become too thin.

However, such materials are not used in a vacuum; they have to be combined with suitable insulators—in order to seal them off from unwanted environmental influences, and also in order to control the flow of current via the so-called field effect. Until now, hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) has frequently been used for this purpose as it forms an excellent environment for 2D materials. However, studies conducted by TU Wien, in cooperation with ETH Zurich, the Russian Ioffe Institute and researchers from Saudi Arabia and Japan, now show that, contrary to previous assumptions, thin hBN layers are not suitable as insulators for future miniaturized field-effect transistors, as exorbitant leakage currents occur. So if 2D materials are really to revolutionize the semiconductor industry, one has to start looking for other insulator materials. The study has now been published in the scientific journal Nature Electronics.

‘A class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, at least in principle, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today,’ the scientists say.

“Conceptually, we demonstrate that any warp drive, including the Alcubierre drive, is a shell of regular or exotic material moving inertially with a certain velocity. Therefore, any warp drive requires propulsion. We show that a class of subluminal, spherically symmetric warp drive spacetimes, at least in principle, can be constructed based on the physical principles known to humanity today.”

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