Lifeboat Foundation

Lattice QCD is not only teaching us how the strong interactions lead to the overwhelming majority of the mass of normal matter in our Universe, but holds the potential to teach us about all sorts of other phenomena, from nuclear reactions to dark matter.

Later today, November 7th, physics professor Phiala Shanahan will be delivering a public lecture from Perimeter Institute, and we&s;ll be live-blogging it right here at 7 PM ET / 4 PM PT. You can watch the talk right here, and follow along with my commentary below. Shanahan is an expert in theoretical nuclear and particle physics and specializes in supercomputer work involving QCD, and I&s;m so curious what else she has to say.

Continue reading “At Last, Physicists Understand Where Matter’s Mass Comes From” »

Turbulence in this sea of charged particles can interfere with satellites 🛰 as well as communication 📡 and navigation 📶 signals. When it launches tomorrow, our #NASAICON mission will watch and image airglow, helping scientists better understand the extreme variability of the region where Earth meets space.

‘’Until now, scientists assumed this all happened in a smooth, coordinated way. ‘’… silly scientists 🤔🙈🤦‍♂️.

Hitting a material with laser light sends vibrations rippling through its latticework of atoms, and at the same time can nudge the lattice into a new configuration with potentially useful properties – turning an insulator into a metal, for instance.

Until now, scientists assumed this all happened in a smooth, coordinated way. But two new studies show it doesn’t: When you look beyond the average response of atoms and vibrations to see what they do individually, the response, they found, is disorderly.

Continue reading “In materials hit with light, individual atoms and vibrations take disorderly paths” »

The kilogram is one of the most important and widely used units of measure in the world — unless you live in the US. For everyone else, having an accurate reading on what a kilogram is can be vitally important in fields like manufacturing, engineering, and transportation. Of course, a kilogram is 1,000 grams or 2.2 pounds if you want to get imperial. That doesn’t help you define a kilogram, though. The kilogram is currently controlled by a metal slug in a French vault, but its days of importance are numbered. Scientists are preparing to re define the kilogram using science.

It’s actually harder than you’d expect to know when a measurement matches the intended standard, even when it’s one of the well–define d Systéme International (SI) units. For example, the meter was originally define d in 1793 as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the north pole. That value was wrong, but the meter has since been re define d in more exact terms like krypton-86 wavelength emissions and most recently the speed of light in a vacuum. The second was previously define d as a tiny fraction of how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Now, it’s pegged to the amount of time it takes a cesium-133 atom to oscillate 9,192,631,770 times. Again, this is immutable and extremely precise.

That brings us to the kilogram, which is a measurement of mass. Weight is different and changes based on gravity, but a kilogram is always a kilogram because it comes from measurements of density and volume. The definition of the kilogram is tied to the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK, see above), a small cylinder of platinum and iridium kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France. Scientists have created dozens of copies of the IPK so individual nations can standardize their measurements, but that’s a dangerous way to go about it. If anything happened to the IPK, we wouldn’t have a standard kilogram anymore.

Continue reading “Scientists Are About to Redefine the Kilogram” »

Spending billions on a huge particle collider won’t give us the breakthrough discoveries we need.

Counting tiny particles that can zip straight through the Earth reveals what the planet is like on the inside.

Scientists at Cern’s Large Hadron Collider have seen something that may force us to abandon everything we thought we knew about the world on the level of particles.

The Large Hadron Collider is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built by humanity. By achieving higher energies and greater numbers of collisions at those energies than ever before, we’ve pushed the frontiers of particle physics past their old boundaries.

Solid-liquid filtration is a ubiquitous process found in industrial and biological systems. Although implementations vary widely, almost all filtration systems are based on a small set of fundamental separation mechanisms, including sieve, cross-flow, hydrosol, and cyclonic separation. Anatomical studies showed that manta rays have a highly specialized filter-feeding apparatus that does not resemble previously described filtration systems. We examined the fluid flow around the manta filter-feeding apparatus using a combination of physical modeling and computational fluid dynamics. Our results indicate that manta rays use a unique solid-fluid separation mechanism in which direct interception of particles with wing-like structures causes particles to “ricochet” away from the filter pores. This filtration mechanism separates particles smaller than the pore size, allows high flow rates, and resists clogging.

Several fundamental mechanisms for solid-fluid separation have been described in the biological and engineering literature, including sieve (1, 2), cross-flow (3–6), hydrosol , and cyclonic separation. Sieve filtration passes a mixture of particles and fluid through a structure with regularly sized pores, causing the particles to be retained while the fluid is drained. Although effective, sieve filters must have pore sizes smaller than the particle size, and they inevitably clog in use (2, 8, 9). Cross-flow filtration is similar to sieving, except that the incoming flow runs parallel rather than perpendicular to the filter. This configuration shears captured particles off the filter’s surface, which reduces but does not eliminate clogging (5, 6). Unlike sieve and cross-flow filters, hydrosol and cyclonic filtration do not require regularly sized pores.