Category Archives: Futurist

Branching Out

The search for extraterrestrial life just got a whole lot more expansive a team of scientists keeping an ear out for alien transmissions just ballooned their operation to examine 200 times the number of star systems it had previously.

The Breakthrough Listen Initiative, an effort to intercept radio transmissions sent out by extraterrestrial civilizations, is now listening to 288,315 star systems instead of its previous 1,327, according to preprint research shared online last week. In all, the change represents a major upgrade to one of the more prominent attempts to find intelligent life in the Milky Way.

The University of Manchester scientists behind the project made the improvements after combing through existing European Space Agency data about the locations and distance from Earth of celestial bodies within 33,000 lightyears, which is the range of their radio telescope.

Knowing the locations and distances to these additional sources, Manchester researcher and team leader Michael Garrett said in a press release, greatly improves our ability to constrain the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence in our own galaxy and beyond. We expect future SETI surveys to also make good use of this approach.

The idea is to identify extraterrestrial civilizations by picking up radio broadcasts, so figuring out how feasible it is for each star system to get a message to Earth helped them narrow down their search while adding the new candidates.

Our results help to put meaningful limits on the prevalence of transmitters comparable to what we ourselves can build using twenty-first-century technology, study coauthor Bart Wlodarczyk-Sroka said in the release.

READ MORE: Breakthrough narrows intelligent life search in Milky Way [University of Manchester]

More on SETI: Scientists Say Life Could Survive Inside Stars

Go here to read the rest:
SETI Team Increases Number of Stars That Might Host Life by 200x - Futurism

According to Anthony Fauci, the United States top infectious disease expert, there could be a safe way to start giving out a COVID vaccine earlier than expected.

Fauci said during aTuesday interview with Kaiser Health News that the Data and Safety Monitoring Board, a committee made up of independent experts who evaluate the safety of vaccine development, could decide that the data is so good right now that you can say its safe and effective.'

In other words, researchers could end the trials early and start giving out the vaccine.

Three COVID vaccines have reached late stage large-scale trials in the US, according to CNN, including one by pharmaceutical company Moderna.

Its a touchy subject and complicating matters is the politicization of the vaccine by U.S. president Donald Trump. Experts have claimed that Trump is pressuring regulators to release a vaccine early to help with his reelection later this year.

Fauci remained steadfast during Tuesdays interview. If you are making a decision about the vaccine, youd better be sure you have very good evidence that it is both safe and effective, Fauci said. Im not concerned about political pressure.

Health experts are reluctant to make any claims as to when a coronavirus vaccine will be made available. Some claim that ending trials early would likely come with inherent safety risks, as CNN reports.

Fauci is optimistic. He believes that we could make rapid progress before the end of 2020.

I believe that by the time we get to the end of this calendar year that we will feel comfortable that we do have a safe and effective vaccine, Fauci told NBC today.

Faucis main concern right now, actually, is the upcoming flu season, something the nation needs to get ahead of.

What Id really like to see is a full court press to get us way down as a baseline, so that when you get these cases in the fall, they wont surge up, Fauci added.

READ MORE: Theres a legitimate way to end coronavirus vaccine trials early, Fauci says [CNN]

More on Fauci: Trump Wants to Approve a COVID Vaccine Before Theyre Done Testing It

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Fauci: We Could Cut Trials Short and Give Out COVID Vaccine "Right Now" - Futurism

Chadwick Bosemans tragic death at the all too young age of 43 from colorectal cancer has been weighing on me the past couple of days. I am a fan. But I also am battling cancer, and I think I understand his incredible productivity in his last years, as he knew he was fighting for his life. He was also fighting for a legacy, something to bequeath those he would leave behind. Having played Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, James Brown and King TChalla among others, he produced a string of pearls, of multi-dimensional performances. At a time when young Black men need hope and role models, he stepped up.

I thought I would say something about the Afro-Futurism that was much discussed with regard to the Wakanda whose ruler he played in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. At the end of The Black Panther, TChalla announces that Wakanda would begin sharing its technology with the world. Someone in the audience asks what a largely agricultural country had to offer, and Boseman just smiles.

Of all the world regions, Africa and the Middle East most suffer from stereotypes in the US media. Elliot Ross at Africaasacountry wrote in 2014 about historian Steven Simons observation that publishers seemed to like putting acacia trees on the covers of novels set in Africa, and, indeed, on books about Africa in general.

I lived about a tenth of my life on the African continent, and can attest that acacias or plane trees just arent common everywhere there.

What has been obscured by Americans stereotypes of Africa as one big wild animal reservation is its own spheres of hyper-modernity.

The complaints of white American conservatives that Wakanda is not a country are peculiarly tone deaf and betray an inability to understand genres of literature. It has been observed that George Orwells 1984 was not about the future. Eric Blair writing as Orwell was describing in the present the worst excesses of fascist and Stalinist societies (and as an anarcho-syndicalist was not above indicting British capitalism either).

Science Fiction and comic books often appeal to hyperbole and exaggeration as their central figure of speech, just as literary fiction likes irony. Wakanda is not the opposite of reality, but an exaggeration of an existing reality, a piling up of realities in one place that are instead scattered.

We dont often see Africa skylines like that of Nairobi in our media:

As for science, there is a lot of it being done on the continent, especially in South Africa, as Cheryl Kahla wrote at The South African.

She points out that Sandile Ngcobo and some physicist colleagues at the University of KwaZuluNatal developed the first digital laser, which can be controlled by computer and does not have to be reset each time it is used.

Some of the inventions come out of Africas special challenges. These obstacles can spur innovation.

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For instance, Africa mostly did not have a network of physical telephone wires, so when cell phone technology came along, Africans adopted it even more widely than other global populations. By 2013 there were 650 million cell phones in Africa, more than in the United States or Europe. We all remember how North African youth wielded this technology to unseat a string of dictators.

Thus, in a BBC report on technological innovations in Africa for 2017 we find that Ugandan engineer Brian Turyabagye has designed a biomedical smart jacket to quickly and accurately diagnose pneumonia in children. In that population it is hard to distinguish it from malaria, but Turyabagye linked a stethoscope in a vest to a mobile phone app that records the audio of the patients chest. Analysis of that audio can detect lung crackles and can lead to preliminary diagnoses.

As for Wakandas new-found vocation of philanthropy, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda are highly rated for charitable giving. Even Liberia, despite its legacy of civil war, is more generous in world rankings than Belgium.

The Black Panthers own Orientalism can get in the way of its futurism. It makes Wakanda a monarchy when Africa is almost entirely made up of republics. Ghana and Senegal have made strides in democracy (and Killmonger could not so easily have taken over a democracy). It garbles Pharaonic religion with Hinduism and displaces both to the south of the subcontinent, whereas the vast majority of Africans are Muslims and Christians, and they have innovated in those traditions. Sufi Murids in Senegal contributed to a powerful strain of Muslim pacifism. If anything the film does not make Africa futuristic enough.

Of course, Africa can sometimes offer a low-tech critique of an overly industrialized, scientistic way of life.

Ironically, if Boseman had actually been, say, a South African, he would have been much less likely to die of that form of cancer. A 2018 paper in the American Journal of Pathology says that:

Incidence rates of CRC are vastly different for African Americans (60 per 100,000 per year) and South African blacks (5 per 100,000 per year). Of the many differences that characterize the environment for these different individuals, diet can play an outsize role in the incidence rates for CRC. The diet for rural South African blacks is highly enriched in fiber and low in meat and fat, whereas the Western diet is low in fiber and high in meat and fat.

Americans would do well to adopt this low tech but life-saving way of life from Africans, cutting down on red meat and fat in favor of nutritious fruits and vegetables. Since red meat is also a high carbon food, reducing its consumption would also help the environment. Africas carbon dioxide and methane emissions are tiny compared to those of supposedly technologically more sophisticated countries.

In one of his many achievements, Boseman (along with the MCU creative team) deployed the tropes of science fiction to create new images of Africa, but African scientific and technological advance is in the present. If it does not get the big international awards, I suspect, it is because it is oriented to practical problem-solving for populations that were set back by a history of European colonialism and exploitation.

These thoughts came to me as I rewatched The Black Panther for the nth time.

I am just one of millions of grieving fans trying to find a way to say goodbye to someone whose spirit I had expected to inspire and guide me for many years to come, and who was cut down in his prime. I am grateful for his life even as I mourn his death.

The rest is here:
Chadwick Bosemans Wakanda: Afro-Futurism Is in the Present - Common Dreams

Right now, anyone in the U.S. trying to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 will likely run into a crucial roadblock: There simply arent enough primate research subjects to go around.

American labs have run into a critical shortage of monkeys, The Atlantic reports. And without them, scientists have no hope of completing the animal testing phases of clinical tests before they can move on to trials with human volunteers. The bottleneck is a bad sign for future attempts to develop a treatment, as scientists who might develop a working vaccine have no way to actually test it out.

Koen Van Rompay is an infectious disease expert at the California National Primate Research Center. He told The Atlantic that due to the shortage, he gets significantly more requests from companies that want to run studies at the facility than he can handle.

I have to tell them, Im sorry, we are not allowed to start your research,' Van Rompay told The Atlantic.

There are numerous problems at play, The Atlantic reports. Theres more demand for monkeys to use in clinical research due to the coronavirus pandemic, but there are fewer monkeys available than ever. China had been supplying 60 percent of monkeys used in American research, but closed down exports due to the pandemic. On top of that, monkeys were already a hot commodity in short supply.

And because hindsight can be cruel, the National Institutes of Health actually discussed creating a strategic monkey reserve back in 2018, but never acted on it. If they had, scientists might still be able to do their important work.

Read more from the original source:
Scientists Are Running Out of Primates to Test Vaccines On - Futurism

An article in Ladies Home Journal predicted 2001 a century earlier. Heres a video version:

Futurism is a hit and miss business: Fast food is predicted (3:40) but so is the extinction of the horse (3:20). Apparently, the futurist, John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., did not foresee a future for horses in recreation and sports except for the rich.

He predicted the internet and wireless communications in principle (5:57, 13:29): A husband sitting in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. But, surprisingly, he did not see much of a commercial future for the airplane but rather favored dirigibles and electrified ships (8:20ff).

He predicted high-speed trains but also electric sleighs for kids (17:16) Hmm. Did he not pause to think about concussion? No surprise, that idea never took off.

When predicting the future, we all may tend to either underestimate the advances:

The average American will live fifty years, as opposed to thirty-five

US life expectancy was about 78.6 years in 2017, principally due to clean water, healthier living conditions, and emergency medicine.

Or else we overestimate them:

The trip to suburban home to office will require only a few minutes a penny will pay the fare Dreamin

Commenters at YouTube offer some thoughts about what the 1901 futurist got right and wrong:

giant guns will fire 25 miles or more Paris gun 13 years later could fire 81 miles.

The whole well get rid of all the annoying flying bugs- thing showed that we clearly hadnt quite figured out the whole everything is connected aspect of the biosphere.

and

He predicted spy satellites in space before man had sent anything into space, granted he said theyd be balloons with cameras attached but they describe satellites

2010 looks back on a 1909 prediction, in this case by Nicola Tesla (18561943) in Popular Mechanics:

He wrote in the magazine that, one day it would be possible to transmit wireless messages all over the world.

Tesla, who spent most of his adult life in America before his death in New York in 1943, imagined such a hand-held device would be simple to use and that, one day, everyone in the world would communicate to friends using it.

This, he added, would usher in a new era of technology.

Imagine. A handheld device

2014 looks back on (roughly) 1914s predictions via French vintage postcards popular during the 1900 Worlds Fair and following:

One thing you see in the cards is a tendency to assume some things wont change, even though they undoubtedly will. In one image, a couple flags down an aerotaxi. Thats futuristic enough, but the man is wearing spats and carrying a cane, while she has a parasol and an enormous hat with a feather. Did they really think transportation would undergo a revolution while fashion stayed frozen in time? In every one of these you see a mix of a futuristic concept with stuff that looks to us to be very old fashioned, [collector Ed] Fries said.

At the same time, theres virtually no hint in the postcards of the truly transformative technologies of the last centurynamely personal computers and the internet.

Heres one card (public domain) depicting an aerocab station as seen from 1900:

Some of the jealously guarded cards are shown in this YouTube video.

and

2018 looks back on 1918s predictions:

On January 6, 1918, the headline of an article in The Washington Times announced that the Automobile of Tomorrow Will Be Constructed Like a Moving Drawing Room. The author was writing about a prediction in Scientific American that described the car of the future. It would be water-tight and weather-proof, with sides made entirely of glass, and seats that could be moved anywhere in the vehicle. It would be decked out with power steering, brakes, heating, and a small control board for navigation. A finger lever would replace the steering wheel. Other designs imagined that cars would roll around on just three wheels, or on air-filled spheres to remove the need for shocks.

So much is right; again, the parts that the futurist gets wrong likely stem from not envisioning practical issues like the increased hazard from smashed glass during a minor collision.

The big disadvantage of making predictions for a century hence is that we probably wont get to find out if they come true.

If you enjoyed this piece, you may also want to look at:

Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it sometimes grows out of it. A senior editor at Wired told us a while back that science fiction writer H. G. Wellss 1914 tale, The World Set Free, formed part of the inspiration for the atomic bomb, exploded over Hiroshima in 1945.

and

Brilliant vision from a century ago foretells todays internet. In E. M. Forsters dystopia, people interact only through the Machine.

Original post:
What Goes Right and Wrong When We Predict a High-Tech Future - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

An expert has warned the world could be plunged into a new Great Depression under a coronavirus worst case scenario.

Peter Schwartz believes the 'cascading crises' currently gripping the world could result in an almost decade-long disaster.

He said these crises include the social turmoil from the Black Lives Matter movement and leadership problems in some countries.

The futurist has warned if scientists fail to find a vaccine, the world could face a Great Depression-style ordeal for years on end.

He added: "We don't have vaccines for a lot of these viruses. So it's entirely plausible we won't for this (coronavirus) either.

"And that means, in turn, that we're not going to get back to 100% of where we were before for years.

"It's like 1929-1937 that sort of timeframe. We are in the Great Depression and so we're below the economic potential for quite a long time.

"Maybe someday we'll get a vaccine but you kind of learn to live in a pandemic world.

"And that is a plausible scenario of depressed economic activity and a persistent pandemic where Covid is the new normal."

Mr Schwartz said the world is currently suffering from four crises - health, economic, social and leadership.

He has described how the situation developed from a health crisis into an economic one.

The expert added: "We had somewhat of an economic crisis going in, a trade war that has now been amplified.

"We have a social crisis now created by the Black Lives Movement worldwide and the response to the George Floyd killing,

"And then finally we have a leadership crisis in some countries. So this is the scenario where essentially the virus really persists."

Mr Schwartz, head of strategic planning at tech company Salesforce, told the World Economic Forum no 'new normal' would arrive without a vaccine.

The expert wrote: "Instead, a 'Covid normal' emerges, with continuing waves of the virus, persistent economic uncertainty and deep societal unrest."

Read this article:
Futurist says coronavirus could last for years 'like the Great Depression' - Mirror Online

Slow Boil

New research suggests that climate change threatens to wipe out significantly more species of fish than previously thought.

If average global temperatures rise by five degrees Celsius thatd be a global warming nightmare scenario then New Scientist reports that 60 percent of all fish species could go extinct by the year 2100. Its grim news, as previous studies predicted that fish would be far more resilient.

Other research gauging the impact of rising water temperatures on fish populations focused exclusively on how well adultfish would be able to adapt. Based on those measurements alone, New Scientist reports that scientists expected only five percent of fish species to die off under the same conditions.

But the new study also takes fish larvae, embryos, and other stages in the fish life cycle into account. And in those phases, the fish are far more vulnerable to higher temperatures.

This is casting light on a life phase that has been largely ignored, Hans-Otto Prtner of the Alfred Wegener Institute told New Scientist.

Thankfully, the year 2100 is still pretty far away, and ambitious efforts to limit climate change could mean many of those species are spared.

We can say 1.5 [degrees] is not paradise, there will be changes, Prtner told New Scientist. But we can limit those changes if we manage to stop climate change. Fish are so important for human nutrition, so this study makes a strong case for protecting our ecosystems and natural environments.

READ MORE: Climate change will make world too hot for 60 per cent of fish species [New Scientist]

More on extinction: Scientists: Human Extinction Is Extremely Likely

See the article here:
Climate Change Threatens 60 Percent of the World's Fish Species - Futurism

This past autumn, a professor at Wuhan University named Jau Tang was hard at work piecing together a thruster prototype that, at first, sounds too good to be true.

The basic idea, he said in an interview, is that his device turns electricity directly into thrust no fossil fuels required by using microwaves to energize compressed air into a plasma state and shooting it out like a jet. Tang suggested, without a hint of self-aggrandizement, that it could likely be scaled up enough to fly large commercial passenger planes. Eventually, he says, it might even power spaceships.

Needless to say, these are grandiose claims. A thruster that doesnt require tanks of fuel sounds suspiciously like science fiction like the jets on Iron Mans suit in the Marvel movies, for instance, or the thrusters that allow Doc Browns DeLorean to fly in Back to the Future.

But in Tangs telling, his invention lets just call it a Tang Jet, which he worked on with Wuhan University collaborators Dan Ye and Jun Li could have civilization-shifting potential here in the non-fictional world.

Essentially, the goal of this technology is to try and use electricity and air to replace gasoline, he said. Global warming is a major threat to human civilization. Fossil fuel-free technology using microwave air plasma could be a solution.

He anticipates this happening fast. In two years, he says, he thinks Tang Jets could power drones. In a decade, hed like to see them fly a whole airplane.

That would all be awesome, obviously. But its difficult to evaluate whether Tangs invention could ever scale up enough to become practical. And even if it did, there would be substantial energy requirements that could doom aerospace applications.

One things for sure: If the tech works the way he hopes, the world will never be the same.

Tangs curriculum vitae flits between a dazzling array of strikingly disparate academic topics, from 4D electron microscopy to quantum dot lasers, nanotechnology, artificial photosynthesis, and, of course, phase transitions and plasmonics.

Hes held several professorships, done research at Caltech and Bell Laboratories, published scores of widely-cited papers, edited several scientific journals, and won a variety of awards. He holds a U.S. patent for a device he calls a synchrotron shutter, designed to capture electrons traveling near the speed of light.

Tang says he first stumbled onto the idea for the plasma thruster when he was trying to create synthetic diamonds. As he tried to grow them using microwaves, he recalls, he started to wonder whether the same technology could be used to produce thrust.

Other huge stories, like the coronavirus pandemic and the baffling saga of Elon Musk naming his baby X A-12, were sucking a lot of oxygen out of the news cycle in early May, when Tang announced his invention to the world. A few outlets picked up Tangs story, including New Atlas, Popular Mechanics, and Ars Technica, but no journalist appears to have actually talked to him.

Because of that, there was little fanfare surrounding the sheer scope of his ambition for the technology and it went overlooked that Tang sometimes sounds as though hes invented a hammer and is now seeing a lot of things as nails.

After describing his plans to conquer aerospace with his new thruster, for instance, he starts to describe plans to take on the automotive industry as well with jet-powered electric cars.

I think the jet engine is more efficient than the electric motor, you can drive a car at much faster speeds, he mused. Thats what I have in mind: to combine the plasma jet engine with a turbine to drive a car.

But you wouldnt want to drive behind it, he warned, because you could be scorched by its fiery jet stream.

Over the course of our interview, Tang also brought up the possibilities of using the technology to build projectile weapons, launch spaceships, power boats, and even create a new type of stove for cooking. On that last point, Tang said that hes already built a prototype kitchen stove powered by a microwave air plasma torch but its so deafeningly loud that it sounds like a constant lightning strike.

Technically, the Tang Jet is an attempt to build a plasma thruster, a concept thats periodically gained attention in scientific circles. Michael Heil, a retired aerospace and propulsion engineer with a long career of Air Force and NASA research, told Futurism that Tangs research reminds him of several other attempts to build air propulsion tech that hes encountered over the years.

Plasma thrusters like those that would power a Tang Jet have been around for a while. NASA first launched a satellite equipped with plasma thrusters back in 2006, but its capabilities are a far cry from what Tang is proposing with his research.

Engineers have long dreamed of a plasma jet-powered plane, but every attempt has been smacked down by the technological limitations of the day. For example, New Scientist reported in 2017 that a team from the Technical University of Berlin attempted to build a similar thruster but like every attempt over the previous decade, their work never became useful outside of the lab.

The problems with these attempts arent so much faults with the theory the concept of generating thrust with a plasma torch is fairly sound. Rather, issues begin to pop up when working out the logistics of building a vehicle that actually works.

Tang has little interest in commercializing the jet himself. Instead, he wants to demonstrate its merits in hopes that well-funded government leaders or titans of industry will be inspired to take the ideas and run with them.

The steps toward realization of a full plasma jet engine would cost lots of money, time and energy, he said. Such investment is beyond our present resources. Such tasks should be taken by aerospace industries or governmental agencies.

Thats a common mindset for scientists, said Christopher Combs, an aerodynamics researcher at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Thats what us academics do, we figure out the physics and say Well I dont want to make a product,' he told Futurism. Its kind of a common refrain to see people in academia who have had something that gets a lot of attention.

Though hes intrigued by the underlying principles of the Tang Jet, Combs says its unlikely that it will scale up to the size needed to lift a plane in other words, the same challenges that proved insurmountable to previous plasma thrusters will rear their heads once again. The current prototype, for perspective, only produces about 10 Newtons of thrust about the same as a medium-sized model rocket.

Youre talking about scaling something by five orders of magnitude more than 100,000 times! Combs said. Which almost never works linearly. Lots of engineering happens in the middle.

And even if it were to scale perfectly, theres the issue of power. Iron Mans suit was powered by an Arc Reactor, and the flying DeLorean was powered by a Mr. Fusion unit that turned household trash into more than a gigawatt of power both of which, unfortunately, are fictional.

Fossil fuels store vastly more energy by weight than batteries, and thats unlikely to change any time soon. And thats too bad, because the Tang Jet needs a whole lot of power.

According to a paper Tang and his collaborators publishedabout the thruster prototype in the journal AIP Advances in May, the technology produces about 28 Newtons of thrust per kilowatt of power. The engines on the Airbus A320, a common commercial jet, produce about 220,000 Newtons of thrust combined, meaning that a comparably-sized jet plane powered by Tang Jets would require more than 7,800 kilowatts.

For perspective, that would mean loading an aircraft up with more than 570 Tesla Powerwall 2 units for a single hour of flight an impractical load, especially because the A320s payload could only carry about 130 of the giant battery units. Long story short, no existing battery tech could provide enough juice.

Does this thing just become a flying Tesla battery? Combs said. With the weight of these batteries, you dont have room for anything else.

The battery weight issue doesnt doom the Tang Jet, but it pushes options for its power source into the fringe. Tang is banking on improvements to battery technology over the next years and decades; those Technical University of Berlin researchers speculated about nuclear fusion. Unfortunately, any possible answers could be decades away or impossible.

It is worth noting that there exist compact nuclear fission reactors, like Russias KLT-40S, that produce enough power and weigh little enough that they could fit in a passenger plane or rocket.

But the safety and environmental implications of nuclear-powered aircraft are grim, and Heil was quick to point out that generating enough power isnt the only problem facing a Tang Jet. Actually getting the electricity from the power source to the thrusters would pose its own difficulties, perhaps requiring superconducting materials that dont exist yet.

You need power to generate thrust. And how do you move that power around on the aircraft? Heil said. Moving and controlling megawatts from the reactor to the jet is a huge challenge. You have to use big thick copper wires, that adds a lot of weight.

Overall, both Combs and Heil questioned the feasibility of a practical Tang Jet based on the technology we have today. Without a quick fix to the energy problem, its certainly a tall order.

But both said they were fascinated by the research and hoped to see future progress. They also pointed out that a plasma thruster could be useful for pushing satellites or spacecraft that are already in orbit though at that point it would need to bring propellant with it rather than using atmospheric air, since thered be none in the vacuum of space.

The bottom line, Heil and Combs agreed, is that we wont have a firmer grasp of the future of the tech until Tangs colleagues have evaluated and experimented with it.

Im rooting for this, and Id love to see it pan out, Combs said. But the scientist in me has some questions and some concerns.

More on Tangs plasma jets: Scientists Create Jet Engine Powered by Only Electricity

More here:
This Scientist Says He's Built a Jet Engine That Turns Electricity Directly Into Thrust - Futurism

Charming Discovery

Physicists at CERNs Large Hadron Collider just discovered a brand-new kind of subatomic particle and its composition is a baffling world-first.

The yet-unnamed particle is the first that we know of to be entirely made up of the same kind of quark, which is a building block for subatomic particles. In this case, according to preprint research shared online Tuesday, the particle is composed of four charm quarks an arrangement that could help physicists better probe the underlying forces holding particles together.

Charm quarks are just one of six flavors of quark, along with up, down, strange, top, and bottom. As one of the heavier flavors, the charm quarks are bound together by the same, poorly-understood fundamental force that binds protons to neutrons. Researchers hope the unusual combination can help them explain how that particular force works.

Particles made up of four quarks are already exotic, project spokesperson Giovanni Passaleva said in a press release, and the one we have just discovered is the first to be made up of four heavy quarks of the same type, specifically two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks.

Next, the team hopes to sort out whether theyve found a true tetraquark or rather two quark pairings that are bound together like atoms in a molecule though both would be valuable discoveries.

Todays discovery opens another exciting chapter in this scientific book, allowing us to study our theory of matter particles in an extreme case, spokesperson Chris Parkes said in the release.

READ MORE: Exotic never before seen particle discovered at CERN [University of Manchester]

More on the LHC: The LHC Just Discovered A New System of Five Particles

Read the original here:
The Large Hadron Collider Just Discovered a Brand-New Particle - Futurism

Cold Shoulder

Overall, the Earth is getting warmer at an ominous rate which, according to an overwhelming majority of climate scientists, is probably a result of greenhouse gas emissions.

Thats why its so interesting, as Mashable points out in a fascinating new story, that one spot in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean appears to be getting colder each year.

A new paper in the journal Nature Climate Change explores possible reasons for the cold spot, which is known as the warming hole or, charmingly, the blob.

The researchers conclusion is that the blog is probably caused by a number of complex factors but mainly changing ocean currents and thick clouds that congregate over it.

Counterintuitively, the researchers say, the same greenhouse effect thats warming most of the Earth is likely causing the complex phenomena that are causing the blob to get colder.

Anthropogenic climate change changes the circuitry of the climate system, said Kristopher Karnauskas, an oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder who had no role in the research. [The cold blob] is an interesting manifestation of the peril were bringing on.

READ MORE: Why Earth has a stubborn spot thats cooling [Mashable]

More on climate change: Climate Change Threatens 60 Percent of the Worlds Fish Species

See original here:
One Particular Spot on Earth Is Getting Colder Instead of Hotter - Futurism