China is building new faster prototype maglev train line. China existing high-speed trains are almost all faster versions of conventional steel wheels on steel rail trains. China only has one 19-mile long high-speed maglev train line from Pudong to the Shanghai International Airport. China has the longest network of conventional high-speed rail in the world. …
Joseph Agnew, undergrad and research assistant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Propulsion Research Center (PRC), presented the results of his study “An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of the Art and Feasibility“. This was part of a session at The Future of Nuclear and Breakthrough Propulsion”. The detection …
Argonne researchers use genetic algorithms to find better superconductors. Certain patterns of defects composed of metallic inclusions were found to maximize the critical current. researchers developed a computer algorithm that treated each defect like a biological gene. Different combinations of defects yielded superconductors able to carry different amounts of current. Once the algorithm identified a …
The Future Circular Collider (FCC) collaboration submitted its Conceptual Design Report (CDR) for publication, a four-volume document that presents the different options for a large circular collider of the future. It showcases the great physics opportunities offered by machines of unprecedented energy and intensity and describes the technical challenges, cost and schedule for realization. The …
Researchers from the CNRS and Université de Sherbrooke, have discovered a universal law for the electronic properties of high-temperature superconductors. They exposed superconductors to an intense magnetic field to weaken superconductivity and reveal underlying properties. They measured the variations of electrical resistivity up to -263 °C, and developed a predictive model that can be applied …
China has carbon nanotube bundles in the lab that are 20 times stronger than kevlar. They are trying to scale them up for mass production. If they succeed in mass producing tons of this material then what has been impossible become possible engineering. Superstrong materials were the key part of molecular nanotechnology speculation. Carbon nanotube …
This October the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop is hosting a special Symposium at the Y-12 New Hope Center in Oak Ridge TN that will promote safe, fast, and affordable human development of our solar system – the first real steps to becoming an interstellar civilization. Leaders from NASA, DOE ARPA-E, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the …
Physicists from MIT, Harvard University, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report that they have for the first time produced a kagome (japanese basketweaving-like structure) metal — an electrically conducting crystal, made from layers of iron and tin atoms, with each atomic layer arranged in the repeating pattern of a kagome lattice. When current flowed across …
University of Rochester researchers are using superconductor-metal interfaces to model and learn the quantum physics of a black hole. They show that the metal-superconductor interface can be thought of as an event horizon and Andreev reflection from the interface is analogous to the Hawking radiation in black holes, giving a unitary description of black hole …
The Metallic Hydrogen Wigner–Huntington transition is only a piece of the story, – the problem of high pressure hydrogen metallization is much more interesting than we thought just a few years ago, with intriguing intermediate phases with unexpected physical properties that continue to be discovered along the way. In February 2017, it was reported that …
MIT physicists have found that a flake of graphene, when brought in close proximity with two superconducting materials, can inherit some of those materials’ superconducting qualities. As graphene is sandwiched between superconductors, its electronic state changes dramatically, even at its center. The researchers found that graphene’s electrons, formerly behaving as individual, scattering particles, instead pair …