Month: September 2016

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24 SEP

Breakthrough Quantum Cat Experiment Captured on Camera

The paradox of Schrödinger’s cat-in which a quantum cat is both alive and dead at the same time until we check to see which state it’s in-is arguably the most famous example of the bizarre counter-intuitive nature of the quantum world. Now, Stanford physicists have exploited this feature weirdness to make highly detailed movies of the inner machinery of simple iodine molecules.

14 SEP

Ripple Aerospace Awarded Innovation Grant

Ripple Aerospace Awarded Innovation Grant Innovation Norway awards funding for breakthrough maritime rocket startup paving the way for Northern Europe’s first indigenous commercial launch company Oslo, September 14th 2016: Low cost access to space is one step closer to becoming a reality for Norway’s Ripple Aerospace after it was announced last Wednesday that it has […]

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14 SEP

The Neural Network Zoo – The Asimov Institute

With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) can be a bit overwhelming at first. So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these are neural networks, some are completely …

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10 SEP

Physicists discover 'smoke rings' made of laser light

Most basic physics textbooks describe laser light in fairly simple terms: a beam travels directly from one point to another and, unless it strikes a mirror or other reflective surface, will continue traveling along an arrow-straight path, gradually expanding in size due to the wave nature of light. But these basic rules go out the window with high-intensity laser light.

08 SEP

The Future of Fueling Stations

The Future of Fueling Stations By: Carla M. Parsons   Follow up article to http://radicalsciencenews.org/the-future-of-transportation-is-near/ (From Back to the Future 2: Universal Studios)   We’ve all wondered what the 2010’s would be like, but have we really reached the future we ought to have, and if not, is there a way to fix it? Before we […]

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06 SEP

Brain circuit that drives sleep-wake states, sleep-preparation behavior is identified

Stanford University School of Medicine scientists have identified a brain circuit that’s indispensable to the sleep-wake cycle. This same circuit is also a key component of the reward system, an archipelago of interconnected brain clusters crucial to promoting behavior necessary for animals, including humans, to survive and reproduce.

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01 SEP

With MIT's "Gravito-Magnetic Trap" ATOMS move A Million Times Slower [VIDEO]

Atoms move a million times slower — it takes them half a minute to move one inch!  Only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero!  MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded — only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. At absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -460 degrees F), all atomic motion comes to a standstill since the cooling process has extracted all the particles’ energy. By improving cooling methods, scientists have succeeded in getting closer and closer to absolute zero. At room temperature, atoms move at the speed of a jet airplane. At the new record-low temperature, atoms are a million times slower — it takes them half a minute to move one inch.

In an ordinary container, particles bounce off the walls. In our container, atoms are repelled by magnetic fields, explained physics graduate student Aaron Leanhardt.

For reaching the record-low temperatures, the MIT researchers invented a novel way of confining atoms, which they call a gravito-magnetic trap. As the name indicates, the magnetic fields act together with gravitational forces to keep the atoms trapped.

A Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) is a state of matter of a dilute gas of bosons cooled to temperatures very close to absolute zero (that is, very near 0 K or −273.15 °C). Under such conditions, a large fraction of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state, at which point macroscopic quantum phenomena become apparent.

In this video Bose-Einstein Condensate of sodium atoms is created in lab at MIT by Martin Zwierlein. Using highly focused, single frequency lasers it is possible to cool the single sodium atoms, negating their thermal vibrations by inducing electronic transitions which effectively pushes them into place. This brings the atoms down to millikelivn temperatures.

 

 

 

 

 

Via: MIT