Physicist Create A Fluid With Negative Mass

Physicist Create a Fluid With Negative Mass

Physicists from Washington State university have created a liquid with negative mass meaning that when you push it, instead of accelerating in that direction, it accelerates backwards.

Matter can have a negative mass much the same way that particles can be negatively charged. Newton’s second law of motion (F=ma) tells us that mass will accelerate in the direction of the force so we can deduce that matter with a negative mass would do the opposite and accelerate against the force.

To create the conditions for negative mass, Peter Engels and his team started by cooling rubidium atoms to a Bose-Einstein condensate meaning they reached very near absolute 0. The researchers used lasers to trap the atoms in an area less than 100 microns across and allow high energy particles to escape cooling them further. Then to create negative mass, the physicists applied a second set of lasers to change the way atoms spin back and forth. They then removed the first set of lasers causing the rubidium to rush out and appear to hit some sort of invisible wall; behaving as if it had a negative mass.

What’s great about this is the control we have over the negative mass without any other complications. This gives us a new tool we can use to engineer experiments in astrophysics looking at neutron stars, black holes, dark energy and a lot more.

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theperpetualscholar

8 years ago

Could This Be The most Powerful Scientific Tool?

Could this be the most powerful scientific tool?

Described as “the biggest biotech discovery of the century” by the scientific community, CRISPR-Cas has been all the rage in labs around the world for its exceptional ease and accuracy in editing the gene of almost any organism.

In 2012, UC Berkeley’s world-renowned RNA expert and biochemist Jennifer Doudna was part of a research team that discovered that you could use the CRISPR system as a programmable tool: scientists can precisely target a gene sequence, cutting and changing the DNA at that exact point.

CRISPR, which stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats” are repeated DNA sequences that are an essential component of a bacteria’s defense system against viruses.

And what started out as a study to understand the bacterial immune system unwittingly resulted in a powerful technology that has the potential to cure genetic diseases, create more sustainable crops, and even render animal organs fit for human transplants.

We’ve had gene-editing technology for decades, but now, “we’re basically able to have a molecular scalpel for genomes,” says Doudna.

“All the technologies in the past were sort of like sledgehammers.”

GIF source: Business Insider

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theperpetualscholar

4 years ago

Crow parent waiting patiently for some snacks, teenage crow waiting not so patiently.

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theperpetualscholar

7 years ago

A note on Nuclear Fission

When an atom fissions, it releases a teeny tiny amount of energy ( The decay of one atom of uranium-235 releases about 200MeV or about 3*10-11J.). But atoms are quite small. An atom does not make a big explosion when it splits.

To get a big explosion, you need to split lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them—many, many trillions of them.

Each one releases only a teeny amount of energy, but when you add up the teeny amount of energy from trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms, then you get a big explosion. (The explosion of 1kg of TNT releases 4MJ).

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theperpetualscholar

8 years ago