Lifeboat Foundation

Physicist Wang Yifang, the mastermind behind the project, gives Nature an update on plans for an ambitious facility.

Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. It’s perhaps the best known law of physics, and Guido Fetta thinks he’s found a way around it.

According to classical physics, in order for something—like a spaceship—to move, conservation of momentum requires that it has to exert a force on something else. A person in roller skates, for example, pushes off against a wall; a rocket accelerates upward by propelling high-velocity combusted fuel downward. In practice, this means that space vessels like satellites and space stations have to carry up to half their weight in propellant just to stay in orbit. That bulks up their cost and reduces their useful lifetime.

Melting gold normally requires temperatures upwards of 1,064° C (1,947° F), but physics is never quite that simple. A team of researchers has now found a way to melt gold at room temperature using an electric field and an electron microscope.

A team of researchers from the Earthquake Research Institute, Department of Civil Engineering and Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo, and the RIKEN Center for Computational Science and RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project in Japan were finalists for the coveted Gordon Bell Prize for outstanding achievements in high-performance computing. Tsuyoshi Ichimura together with Kohei Fujita, Takuma Yamaguchi, Kengo Nakajima, Muneo Hori and Lalith Maddegedara were praised for their simulation of earthquake physics in complex urban environments.

Scientists used to think a “warp bubble” would require an impractical amount of energy. That’s starting to change.

A weird behavior challenges what we thought we knew.

Two possibilities: Either the image captures two massive galactic clusters in the process of colliding, or NASA is covering up the existence of a starship so big it’s several million light years long.

Humanity’s current understanding of physics may suggest faster-than-light travel is impossible, but researchers here on Earth can still observe happening in places much too far away to ever actually visit (and generally only what they looked like in the distant past). One of them is a galactic collision that, at least from our planetary vantage point, looks an awful lot like a craft going where no man has ever gone before.

Continue reading “NASA Image of Merging Galaxy Clusters Looks Suspiciously Like the USS Enterprise” »

NVIDIA’s playing a bigger role in high performance computing than ever, just as supercomputing itself has become central to meeting the biggest challenges of our time.

Speaking just hours ahead of the start of the annual SC18 supercomputing conference in Dallas, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told 700 researchers, lab directors and execs about forces that are driving the company to push both into “scale-up” computing — focused on large supercomputing systems — as well as “scale-out” efforts, for researchers, data scientists and developers to harness the power of however many GPUs they need.

Continue reading “SC18: HPC Demand Surges, Accelerated” »

This could be the last decade that cosmologists debate how fast the universe is expanding.