A Remarkable New Thruster

The history of space travel is filled with impressive sizzle reels of fire-breathing chemical engines launching monumental rockets skyward toward the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

While these massive devices are marvels of human engineering, the real workhorses of the space industry are the immensely less-gargantuan ion thrusters.

These engines are as old as rocketry itself—Soviet and German rocket leaders first dreamed up their future uses more than a century ago. And today, these electric propulsion systems power the swarms of satellites around Earth that make modern life possible. 

Unlike chemical rockets that throw out gasses for propulsion, ion engines are powered by individual atoms, which makes them much more fuel efficient and allows satellites to operate for longer.     READ MORE...

Evidence We Live in a Simulation

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo) discovers a truth to end all truths—the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder (and explains how Neo can learn kung-fu in about five seconds), the idea isn’t quite as carefully relegated to the fiction section as one might expect.

University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, who studies the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile, leans into the cinematic comparison. In an article published on website The Conversation this past October, Vopson invoked the Wachowskis’ sci-fi masterpiece, and around the same time, he published a book on the subject—Reality Reloaded, a subtle hat tip to the title of the less successful Matrix sequel. While he is just one among many who’ve contemplated the idea, Vopson claims to have one thing that those before him lacked: evidence.                READ MORE...

A Paradigm Shift in RAM

Your computer wouldn’t be very useful without RAM, which is short for random access memory. These chips function as the temporary storage for an operating system, and speed is of great importance, as they’re constantly needing to access bits of memory to keep everything running smoothly. 

For more than two decades, the most advanced version of this technology—magnetoresistive RAM, or MRAM—has been the go-to tech for the kind of intense computing necessary in industrial, military, and space applications.

Now, a new breakthrough discovered by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has illustrated how a mechanism in a laser beam can control the magnetic state in solids, which the scientists describe as a “paradigm shift” in our understanding of the behavior between light and magnetic materials. 

The results of the study were published earlier this year in the journal Physical Review Research.           READ MORE...

A Chinese Humanoid Robots Sets Record

The human body isn’t really an ideal template for a robot. Out of the entire family of primates, Homo sapiens are the only ones who spend a majority of their time on two feet—a biological outlier that isn’t exactly easy to replicate in artificial form. In the past decade, many companies have created impressive facsimiles: robots that can run, jump, and stumble just like a real boy. But none of them have been able to generate very much speed while doing so. That’s beginning to change.

Earlier this month, the Chinese robotic company Unitree uploaded a sizzle video to Youtube that highlighted the impressive attributes of its H1 humanoid robot. Chief among those impressive attributed is the robot’s startling speed, clocking in at an impressive 3.3 m/s, or roughly 7.4 mph. That beats the previous record holder, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, which can book it at a steady 5.59 mph. Unitree claims that its artificial creation can even reach speeds of up to 11 mph.     READ MORE...

A Medieval Village Uncovered

During the intense and bloody French Revolution (1789-1799), Catholic churches and abbeys didn’t fare very well. In 1789, the National Constituent Assembly decided to seize all Catholic property and sell it off in an effort to fund the fledgling Revolutionary currency. 

The Beaumont Abbey, which had existed outside the city of Tours, France for nearly 800 years, was swept up in this nationwide land grab, its 46 nuns were expelled, and the abbey itself was eventually demolished.

But unknown at the time of its demolition, a treasure trove of medieval history rested underneath the abbey. The area contained some 1,000 burial sites—the graveyard of the centuries-old abbey—and remnants of the medieval town of Belmons, which the Beaumont Abbey effectively replaced.  READ MORE...

Alice Rings

Topological monopoles are a quantum physics phenomenon that can decay into what’s known as “Alice rings.”

Named after Lewis Carroll’s famous heroine, this vortex ring flips the magnetic charge of any monopole that passes through it, creating an anti-monopole.

Although these rings last only 80 or so milliseconds, they could have big implications in the study of cosmology and high-energy physics.

The literary works of Lewis Carroll and the complex machinations of quantum physics rarely cross paths—but when they do, it’s about as mind-bending as it sounds.

Last month, scientists from Aalto University in Finland and Amherst College in Massachusetts created a bizarre quantum object known as an ‘Alice ring.’ An homage to Carroll’s titular character in Alice in Wonderland, the name is an apt one. 

This decayed monopole—a particle with only one magnetic pole—opens a “vortex ring” that flips the magnetic charge of any other monopole passing through its center, creating an “anti-monopole.” The results of the study were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.     READ MORE...

Turning Cells into Stem Cells

For decades, scientists have been able to create stems cells—known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells—from somatic cells, such as those found in our skin.

However, these iPS cells still retain ghosts of their cellular pasts, which makes them less effective as a therapeutic tool.

A new study, using a method called transient-naïve-treatment (TNT) mimics the normal reprogramming process in early embryonic development to essentially wipe a cell’s memory, making these cells more similar to embryonic stem (ES) cells both molecularly and functionally.

Stem cells are the raw materials of the human body—they’re the original cells from which almost all other cells with specialized functions originate. So, the ability to use these cells in therapeutic treatments is immensely important. So important, in fact, that over the past couple of decades, scientists have devised ways to reprogram non-reproductive cells, also known as somatic cells, into embryonic stem (ES) cells known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

This process is central to the field of regenerative medicine, which replaces diseased cells with healthy ones derived from these iPS cells. But there was just one problem—these reprogrammed cells retained ghosts of their past lives, making these treatments less effective than they otherwise could be.

“A persistent problem with the conventional reprograming process is that iPS cells can retain an epigenetic memory of their original somatic state, as well as other epigenetic abnormalities,” Ryan Lister, from the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research and The University of Western Australia, said in a press statement. “This can create functional differences between the iPS cells and the ES cells they’re supposed to imitate, and specialized cells subsequently derived from them, which limits their use.”      READ MORE...

Theory of Gravity Contradicted

Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, an immensely important update to Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, is currently our best approximation of how the universe ticks.

But there are some holes in Einstein's theory, including some gravitational weirdness around low acceleration “wide binary” stars.

A new study claims that the behavior of these slow-moving celestial objects can’t be explained by a Newton-Einstein theory, which relies on dark matter, but could be explained with an idea known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND.

In 1687, English physicist Isaac Newton published his famous Law of Universal Gravitation. The idea that all objects attract in proportion to their mass was a revolutionary idea that became a huge boon for understanding the ways of the universe. 

But even Newton’s influential work had its limitations—specifically, it couldn’t explain gravitational phenomena such as black holes and gravitational waves. Thankfully, Albert Einstein came around in the early 20th century to help patch things up a bit with his Theory of General Relativity.

But space is a big place, and even Einsteins sometimes meet their limit. One of the most well-known of these limits is a black hole’s center, or singularity, where Einstein’s famous theory appears to break down completely. 

Now, a new study from scientists at South Korea’s Sejong University suggests that another limit to Newton and Einstein’s conception of gravity can be found in the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars—also known simply as “wide binaries.” The results of this study were published this month in The Astrophysical Journal.     READ MORE...

First Branch on the Tree of Life

Scientists have discovered which animal was the first to branch off from our collective common ancestor.

For years, debate had raged over whether the first to diverge was the sea sponge or the comb jelly.

Thanks to new chromosomal analysis techniques, we finally have an answer.

All animals on Earth share a common ancestor. Trace back the history of any creature from humans to slugs, and you’ll eventually be able to follow all of the branches on the animal tree of life back to its trunk.

But that trunk had to branch off at some point, or we wouldn’t have all of today’s animals. And that first split has been a bit elusive to scientists, due to it taking place around 600 million years ago.

We know a few things, though. Namely, we know that the first split resulted in the birth of two creatures—the ancestor of almost all animals, and the “sister” to that ancestor. That sister is the ancestor of just one group of modern-day animals.

For decades, scientists have debated which group of animals traces its lineage back to the “sister” of literally all other animals. They had two contenders for a long time—sea sponges and comb jellies.   READ MORE...

THe Reality of Wireless Energy

DARPA plans to create wireless energy transfer infrastructure to supply near-uninterruptable power to U.S. military bases worldwide. The plan, as reported by Popular Mechanics, is to use laser technology to beam electricity around the planet. Famously a dream of Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago, if successful, this technology, called fittingly enough POWER ("Persistent Optical Wireless Energy Relay"), would make the U.S. military less reliant on liquid fuel like diesel and vulnerable power lines, which can be intercepted or sabotaged by enemy forces.

“First of all, the environment has changed, and the need for more resilient energy transport methods for military operations is at a premium,” explained Col. Paul “Promo” Calhoun to Popular Mechanics in an exclusive interview. American forces operate globally like the special operations units he resupplied as a C-17 cargo pilot, from outposts in the South China Sea to the Iraqi desert. Since there is no simple way to power them, many forces use their radars, anti-drone microwave weapons, lasers, or other energy-intensive equipment. And with each passing year, the severity of the issue increases.

“On the technology side, significant advancements have been made in high-energy lasers, wavefront sensing, adaptive optics, high-altitude electric air platforms, safety interlocks, and narrow-bandgap-tuned high-efficiency photovoltaics,” Col. Calhoun explains.

“POWER is an optical power beaming program,” Calhoun says. “There are other potential power-beaming modalities, such as microwaves, that we intend to explore in future programs. For POWER, the propagating wave is a laser [that] provides long-range high-throughput capability when transmitted at high altitudes. The relays redirect the laser energy without conversion, and then the end-user converts that laser energy back into electricity using narrow-bandgap-tuned monochromatic photovoltaics,” he added.  READ MORE...

Turning Solar Power Into Hydrogen Fuel

 

• Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology broke through the 1-kilowatt ceiling of green hydrogen generation using solar energy.
• The system turns solar power into hydrogen, oxygen, and heat.
• The lab wants to find new ways to use solar to create useful energy sources.

Researchers in Switzerland took a promising lab experiment and scaled it into a real-world example of how we could use solar energy to produce green hydrogen. Their system broke the coveted 1-kilowatt ceiling for green hydrogen production, and offers a new commercialization opportunity.

This efficient convertor of solar energy to fuel functions as an efficient artificial photosynthesis system, according to a new study by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) published in Nature Energy. It also produces useful byproducts of oxygen and heat.

“This is the first system-level demonstration of solar hydrogen generation,” Sophia Haussener, head of the Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering at EPFL, says in a news release. 

“Unlike typical lab-scale demonstrations, it includes all auxiliary devices and components, so it gives us a better idea of the energy efficiency you can expect once you consider the complete system, and not just the device itself.”

To make it all happen, a system that looks like a satellite dish has been engineered to act like a tree. The 23-foot-diameter dish concentrates the sun’s radiation power nearly 1,000 times. 

When water is piped into the system, a connected reactor uses photoelectrochemical cells powered by that concentrated solar radiation to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. 

The process—dubbed artificial photosynthesis—also generates heat, which can move through a heat exchanger to reach a useful finished state.  READ MORE...

Manipulating Quantum Light

Albert Einstein's stimulated emission theory has been validated by large amounts of light, but never before by individual photons.

New research offers the ability to manipulate and identify single photons, allowing for the manipulation of quantum light.

Continued development of this technology has the potential to lead to huge advancements in quantum computing.

Scientists stand ready to manipulate quantum light, just as Albert Einstein envisioned in 1916.  Researchers from the University of Sydney and the University of Basel successfully managed to manipulate and identify small numbers of interacting photons—packets of light energy. According to the team, this work represents an unprecedented landmark development for quantum technologies.

Stimulated light emission—a theory first proposed by Einstein in 1916 that helps explain how photons can trigger atoms to emit other photons—laid the basis for the invention of the laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). 

It’s long been understood for large numbers of photons, but this new research has allowed scientists to both observe and effect stimulated emission for single photons for the first time. Researchers measured the direct time delay between one photon and a pair of bound photons scattering off a single quantum dot, a type of artificially created atom.  READ MORE...

Stellarator Reactor

1. With the promise of fusion on full display after a U.S. lab achieved “ignition” late last year, fusion companies are raising capital to bring this next-gen green energy to life.
2. Magnetic confinement reactors, such as tokamaks and stellarators, are the leading fusion concept, and are designed to contain super-hot plasma long enough to sustain fusion reactions.
3. Although tokamaks are more abundant and easier to build, the company Type One Fusion just received millions to bring its stellarator reactor to market.

Fusion reactors come in all shapes and sizes, but can mostly be separated into three groups, defined by how they contain the super-hot plasma needed to combine lighter nuclei into heavier ones.

The first is gravitational reactors (a.k.a. stars), which are impossible to recreate on Earth. The second group is inertial reactors, which essentially fire a bunch of lasers at a small pellet and contain the resulting fusion reaction by sheer inertia for only 100 trillionths of a second. This is the concept that finally achieved ignition last December. But it’s the third group—magnetic reactors—that’s arguably the most promising.

Magnetic confinement fusion uses superconducting magnets to contain hot plasma long enough for a fusion reaction to take place. These magnets are absolutely critical, as they keep the plasma from touching any of the other materials in the reactor, and no known material can withstand the over-100-million-degrees-Celsius temperatures required for fusion. But even this kind of fusion divides into a further two camps: tokamaks and stellarators.   READ MORE...

Time Reflections

The explanation of spatial reflections—whether by light or by sound—are pretty intuitive. Electromagnetic radiation in the form of light or sound waves hit a mirror or wall, respectively, and change course. 

This allows our eyes to see a reflection or echo of the original input. However, for more than 50 years, scientists have theorized that there’s another kind of reflection in quantum mechanics known as time reflection.

This term might conjure up images of a nuclear-powered DeLorean or a particular police box (that’s bigger on the inside), but that’s not quite what scientists mean by the term. 

Instead, time reflections occur when the entire medium in which an electromagnetic wave travels suddenly changes course. This causes a portion of that wave to reverse and its frequency transforms into another one.

Because these time reflections require a uniform variation across an entire electromagnetic field, scientists assumed it would require too much energy to actually observe time reflections in action. 

But scientists from the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) in New York City successfully observed time reflections by sending broadband signals into a strip of metal filled with electronic switches that were connected to reservoir capacitors.  READ MORE...

Future of Internet

On October 29, 1969, a message was sent from a rather nondescript room at UCLA in Southern California to a Stanford Research Institute computer console in Menlo Park, California. It read simply “Lo,” though it was supposed to say “Login.” The system crashed before completing the task. This was the world’s first message sent via an interconnected computer network known as ARPANET. On this unassuming fall day, the modern internet as we now know it was conceived.

In the five decades since, the internet has transformed human existence. From how we wage war to how we make each other laugh, it's unfathomable how much the internet has shaped life in that short amount of time.

But what will the future of the internet look like in 50 years? How will we solve the challenges that we are currently facing around privacy and data protection? Should we be hopeful—or fearful—for our changing digital world?

We asked these questions to a variety of experts, researchers, scientists, engineers, and futurists. The answers we got back were fascinating, clarifying, and somewhat scary.

In 2019, the Pew Research Center released its own data about the future of digital life after canvassing 530 experts. Lee Rainie, director of internet and tech research at Pew, was one of the co-authors of the study. He says that the answers were eye-opening in terms of how our digital presence will come to further define our existence. “[In their responses], they talked about what the definition of a human being, literally, will be once this technology is available for our bodies and brains.”

According to our experts, that will come sooner rather than later. Within only the next quarter century, the way we search or use the internet will be considered “archaically clunky,” writes Judith Donath, who is a researcher for the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and author of the 2014 book The Social Machine. Rather, our digital presence will not be separate from the physical world, but ingrained in it.

“Gone will be keyboards, the mouse, and screens,” continues Donath.

Toby Negrin, Wikimedia Foundation’s Chief Product Officer, compared the internet to electricity as it becomes an “omnipresent utility, something we expect to always be available and around us... intertwined in our daily lives.”

The world in front of us will be a mix of reality and the virtual and, at times, it will be impossible to decipher which one is which. Mike Liebhold—a senior researcher at the Institute of the Future and at Apple's Advanced Technology Lab in the 1980s—writes that, in the near future, everyone will wear augmented reality glasses and use them to interact with their environment. “Information will be displayed, floating in the air ... the web will appear in the real world, not just on glass screens.”  READ MORE...