Lifeboat Foundation

Every second, a star dies in the universe. But these stellar beings don’t just completely vanish, stars always leave something behind.

Some stars explode in a supernova, turning into a black hole or a neutron star, while the majority of stars become white dwarfs, a core of the star it once used to be. However, a new study reveals that these white dwarfs contribute more to life in the cosmos than previously believed.

New observations of white dwarf stars reveal their stellar contribution to carbon atoms in the cosmos, one of the building blocks of life.

Samsung’s latest scientific breakthrough might change the very way we perceive semiconductors, largely on account of the fact it’s two-dimensional. Called amorphous boron nitride (a-BN), the substance in question is composed of but a single layer of atoms and characterized by an amorphous (liquid-like) molecule structure. It’s also the best 2D material for insulation ever synthetized, with Samsung hoping it will be able to utilize in production of revolutionary graphene wafers with unprecedentedly low level of electrical interference.

The discovery of a-BN is hardly Samsung’s first foray into 2D materials. The first and possibly most famous such substance — graphene — has been the subject of countless projects at the Korean conglomerate ever since it was first isolated in 2004. Following the 2016 Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, Samsung is believed to have doubled down on graphene R&D with the goal of eventually integrating the 2D material into its batteries, making them more stable, i.e. less prone to spontaneous combustions.

Making graphene batteries is no small feat, however, and it’s been a while since Samsung last made significant inroads on that front. Scalability remains a key issue, particularly in regards to mass-production costs. Graphene wafers, on the other hand, are expected to play a major role in the development and volume production of next-generation server memory modules, as well as DRAM and NAND memory chips.

Zero electrical resistance at room temperature? A material with this property, i.e. a room temperature superconductor, could revolutionize power distribution. But so far, the origin of superconductivity at high temperature is only incompletely understood. Scientists from Universität Hamburg and the Cluster of Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” have succeeded in observing strong evidence of superfluidity in a central model system, a two-dimensional gas cloud for the first time. The scientists report on their experiments in the journal Science, which allow to investigate key issues of high-temperature superconductivity in a very well-controlled model system.

There are things that aren’t supposed to happen. For example, water cannot flow from one glass to another through the glass wall. Surprisingly, quantum mechanics allows this, provided the barrier between the two liquids is thin enough. Due to the quantum mechanical tunneling effect, particles can penetrate the barrier, even if the barrier is higher than the level of the liquids. Even more remarkably, this current can even flow when the level on both sides is the same or the current must flow slightly uphill. For this, however, the fluids on both sides must be superfluids, i.e. they must be able to flow around obstacles without friction.

This striking phenomenon was predicted by Brian Josephson during his doctoral thesis, and it is of such fundamental importance that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. The current is driven only by the wave nature of the superfluids and can, among other things, ensure that the superfluid begins to oscillate back and forth between the two sides—a phenomenon known as Josephson oscillations.

Layered van der Waals materials are of high interest for electronic and photonic applications, according to researchers at Penn State and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, in California, who provide new insights into the interactions of layered materials with laser and electron beams.

Two-dimensional van der Waals materials are composed of strongly bonded layers of molecules with weak bonding between the layers.

The researchers used a combination of ultrafast pulses of laser light that excite the atoms in a material lattice of gallium telluride, followed by exposing the lattice to an ultrafast pulse of an electron beam. This shows the lattice vibrations in real time using electron diffraction and could lead to a better understanding of these materials.

In a development that could finally shed light on dark matter, an international team of scientists have detected neutral hydrogen atoms, from a galaxy other than our own, for the very first time.

The finding came thanks to the enormous Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST), which sits in a hilly, green natural basin in southwest China’s Guizhou Province.

The researchers detected the hydrogen coming from three extragalactic galaxies with only five minutes of exposure, a feat that demonstrates the exceptional sensitivity of the telescope. It is the first time neutral hydrogen from outside the Milky Way has been detected.

Scientists at the University of Tsukuba use computer calculations to propose a new way to rearrange the carbon atoms in a diamond to make it even harder, which may be useful in industrial applications that rely on synthetic cutting diamonds.

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba used computer calculations to design a new carbon-based material even harder than diamond. This structure, dubbed “pentadiamond” by its creators, may be useful for replacing current synthetic diamonds in difficult cutting manufacturing tasks.

Diamonds, which are made entirely of carbon atoms arranged in a dense lattice, are famous for their unmatched hardness among known materials. However, carbon can form many other stable configurations, called allotropes. These include the familiar graphite in pencil lead, as well as nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes. The mechanical properties, including hardness, of an allotrope depend mostly on the way its atoms bond with each other. In conventional diamonds, each carbon atom forms a covalent bond with four neighbors. Chemists call carbon atoms like this as having sp³ hybridization. In nanotubes and some other materials, each carbon forms three bonds, called sp² hybridization.

Scientists have made a pivotal breakthrough in the important, emerging field of spintronics—which could lead to a new high speed energy efficient data technology.

An international team of researchers, including the University of Exeter, has made a revolutionary discovery that has the potential to provide high speed, low power-usage for some of the world’s most well-used electronic devices.

While today’s information technology relies on electronics that consumes a huge amount of energy, the electrons within electric currents can also transfer a form of angular momentum called spin.

There’s a new exotic subatomic particle on the atom smasher. Physicists working with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) collaboration have found a new form of the elusive four-quark particle called a tetraquark that they have never seen before.

The newly identified particle is made up of four quarks of the same flavour and is likely, scientists say, to be the first of a previously undiscovered class of particles.

The paper describing it has been uploaded to arXiv, and is yet to be peer-reviewed, but joins a growing body of evidence supporting the existence of exotic particles.

The ‘quasiparticles’ defy the categories of ordinary particles and herald a potential way to build quantum computers.