Lifeboat Foundation

Earth’s magnetic field plays a key role in making our planet habitable. The protective bubble over the atmosphere shields the planet from solar radiation, winds, cosmic rays and wild swings in temperature.

However, Earth’s magnetic field almost collapsed 591 million years ago, and this change, paradoxically, may have played a pivotal role in the blossoming of complex life, new research has found.

“In general, the field is protective. If we had not had a field early in Earth history water would have been stripped from the planet by the solar wind (a stream of energized particles flowing from the sun toward Earth),” said John Tarduno, a professor of geophysics at the University of Rochester in New York and senior author of the new study.

A particle-beam-generating method—called wakefield acceleration—uses proton bunches, which can fragment into high-density filaments as a result of their interactions with plasma, new experiments show.

Superradiant atoms offer a groundbreaking method for measuring time with an unprecedented level of precision. In a recent study published by the scientific journal Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Copenhagen present a new method for measuring the time interval, seconds, that overcomes some of the limitations that even today’s most advanced atomic clocks encounter. This advancement could have broad implications in areas such as space exploration, volcanic monitoring, and GPS systems.

The second, which is the most precisely defined unit of measurement, is currently measured by atomic clocks in different places around the world that together tell us what time it is. Using radio waves, atomic clocks continuously send signals that synchronize our computers, phones, and watches.

Oscillations are the key to keeping time. In a grandfather clock, these oscillations are from a pendulum’s swinging from side to side every second, while in an atomic clock, it is a laser beam that corresponds to an energy transition in strontium and oscillates about a million billion times per second.

Argonne National Laboratory scientists have used anomaly detection in the ATLAS collaboration to search for new particles, identifying a promising anomaly that could indicate new physics beyond the Standard Model.

Scientists used a neural network, a type of brain-inspired machine learning algorithm, to sift through large volumes of particle collision data in a study that marks the first use of a neural network to analyze data from a collider experiment.

Particle physicists are tasked with mining this massive and growing store of collision data for evidence of undiscovered particles. In particular, they’re searching for particles not included in the Standard Model of particle physics, our current understanding of the universe’s makeup that scientists suspect is incomplete.

Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.

String theory could provide a theory of everything for our universe—but it entails 10⁵⁰⁰ (more than a centillion) possible solutions. AI models could help to find the right one.

By Manon Bischoff

Tiny little threads whizzing through spacetime and vibrating incessantly: this is roughly how you can imagine the universe, according to string theory. The various vibrations of the threads generate the elementary particles, such as electrons and quarks, and the forces acting among them.

Chemical reactions are complex mechanisms. Many different dynamic processes are involved, affecting both the electrons and the nucleus of the present atoms. Very often, the strongly coupled electron and nuclear dynamics induce radiation-less relaxation processes known as conical intersections. Such dynamics, which are at the basis of many biological and chemical relevant functions, are extremely difficult to detect experimentally.

For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers from Linköping University, Sweden, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals. Their findings are published in the journal Nature Synthesis.

Scientists have long tried to make single-atom-thick sheets of gold but failed because the metal’s tendency to lump together. But researchers from Linköping University have now succeeded thanks to a hundred-year-old method used by Japanese smiths.

“If you make a material extremely thin, something extraordinary happens — as with graphene. The same thing happens with gold. As you know, gold is usually a metal, but if single-atom-layer thick, the gold can become a semiconductor instead,” says Shun Kashiwaya, researcher at the Materials Design Division at Linköping University.

A year after all but ruling out the possibility, a pair of theoretical physicists from Japan and the Netherlands have found quantum entanglement has something fundamentally in common with the physics that drives steam engines, dries your socks, and may even keep the arrow of time pointed in one direction.

This universal property, if indeed it exists as they suggest, would govern all transformations between entangled systems and give physicists a way to measure and compare entanglement beyond counting qubits – and know their limits of manipulating entangled pairs.

Quantum entanglement, the tendency for the quantum fuzziness of different objects to mathematically merge, is a fundamental part of quantum computing along with superposition. When particles, atoms, or molecules are entangled, knowing something about one tells us something of the other.