Lifeboat Foundation

Falling through the Solar System at an astonishing 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just smashed the record for fastest object ever to be created by human hands.

The event on September 27 marks the turning point of the mission’s 17^th loop around the Sun as it collects data on the heated winds of charged particles and violent magnetism that surround our closest star, and comes just under three years after its previous record of 586,863.4 kilometers (364,660 miles) per hour.

At these speeds, it’d be possible for an aircraft to circumnavigate our planet roughly 15 times in a single hour, or zoom from New York to Los Angeles in just over 20 seconds.

Here, we also expanded the applicability of the second law of infodynamics to explain phenomenological observations in atomic physics. In particular, we demonstrated that the second law of infodynamics explains the rule followed by the electrons to populate the atomic orbitals in multi-electron atoms, known as the Hund’s rule. Electrons arrange themselves on orbitals, at equilibrium in the ground state, in such a way that their information entropy is always minimal.

Most interesting is the fact that the second law of infodynamics appears to be a cosmological necessity. Here, we re-derived this new physics law using thermodynamic considerations applied to an adiabatically expanding universe.

Finally, one of the great mysteries of nature is: Why does symmetry dominate in the universe? has also been explained using the second law of infodynamics. Using simple geometric shapes, we demonstrated that high symmetry always corresponds to the lowest information entropy state, or lowest information content, explaining why everything in nature tends to symmetry instead of asymmetry.

Without verbal communication, a group of 100 longhorn crazy ants can simultaneously grab onto an object 10,000 times their weight and collectively walk it to their nest. Scientists understand the ant-behavioral rules behind this feat but have lacked a coarse-grained description of how the group moves. Tabea Heckenthaler of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and her colleagues now provide that description, showing that it fits expectations for a self-propelled particle [1]. The finding offers a simplified route to modeling complex systems.

When a foraging ant happens upon a tasty morsel too big to carry alone, she recruits other ants via a pheromone trail. When enough helpers are gathered, they grab on with their mouths and move the object toward home. Ants at the front pull the load, while those at the back lift to reduce friction. From studies of individual ants, scientists have gleaned other details; for example, after an ant grabs on, she spends around 10 seconds pulling in what she thinks is the direction of the nest—regardless of the group’s actual direction—before aligning her efforts with the other workers. There is also a constant turnover of workers, with ants dropping off and new ants immediately filling gaps.

Instead of accounting for such individual behaviors, Heckenthaler and her colleagues consider the ants and the food item as a single moving system. From experiments performed with a cog-shaped load coated in cat food (to encourage the ants), they find that the ant-load system follows trajectories similar to the directed walks of individual self-propelled particles. Comparing trajectories of cogs carried by different numbers of ants, the researchers then show that they can work out details of the ants’ individual behavior from the group-level measurements.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes the development of quantum dots, particles whose size controls their color, making them useful for technologies such as displays.

We know less about the strength of the strong force than of any of the other fundamental forces of nature, but researchers at CERN have now made the most precise measurement of it ever.

By Leah Crane

“Using the new quantum ruler to study how the circular orbits vary with magnetic field, we hope to reveal the subtle magnetic properties of these moiré quantum materials”

Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon, is renowned for its exceptional electrical conductivity and mechanical strength.

However, when two or more layers of graphene are stacked with a slight misalignment, they become moiré quantum matter, opening the door to a world of exotic possibilities. Depending on the angle of twist, these materials can generate magnetic fields, become superconductors with zero electrical resistance, or transform into perfect insulators.

Ultralight dark matter particles that behave like waves, called axions, seem to be a better match for gravitational lensing measurements than more traditional explanations for dark matter.

By Leah Crane

Scientists have caught fast-moving hydrogen atoms—the keys to countless biological and chemical reactions—in action.

A team led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University used ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) to record the motion of hydrogen atoms within ammonia molecules. Others had theorized they could track hydrogen atoms with electron diffraction, but until now nobody had done the experiment successfully.

The results, published in Physical Review Letters, leverage the strengths of high-energy Megaelectronvolt (MeV) electrons for studying hydrogen atoms and proton transfers, in which the singular proton that makes up the nucleus of a hydrogen atom moves from one molecule to another.

Physicists have used the famous particle smasher to investigate the strange phenomena of quantum entanglement at far higher energies than ever before.

By Alex Wilkins