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2 days ago

Who wants to go on a magic carpet ride? ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have managed to levitate two small plastic plates using just light.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ With the energy from a set of bright LEDs in a vacuum chamber, the team coaxed two tiny Mylar plates to hover — a bona fide breakthrough, Wired reports, because scientists have never before been able to cause an object that large to float using light alone.  ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ "When the two samples lifted, there was a gasp between all four of us," UPenn engineering doctoral candidate Mohsen Azadi told the magazine. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ If you’re hoping to pick up a light-powered magic carpet from Amazon anytime soon, you’ll have to keep waiting. Scientists are more interested in using this technology to research the mesosphere, a high-up region of the atmosphere that’s notoriously difficult to study.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ #science #futurism #hovercraft #LEDs #wired #upenn #amazon #sciencenews #technews #tech

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3 days ago

Well... one less mystery to ponder when you're lying awake at 4 am and can't sleep. ⁠⁠🥲 ⁠⁠ Decades — or tens of millions of years — later, depending on how you look at it, scientists believe they’ve finally reached a verdict on the case of what killed the dinosaurs.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Back in the 1980s, scientists were fairly confident that a gigantic asteroid rained down hellfire and committed a mass atrocity against the world’s dinosaurs. Now, they’ve finally found the smoking gun evidence they needed to seal the verdict, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. That evidence? Asteroid dust, preserved within the scene of the ancient crime. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Read the full story via the link in our bio. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ #dino #jurassicpark #trex #dinosaurs #prehistoric #geology #space #asteroid #futurism #news #sciencenews #fossil

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5 days ago

**Opens private browser** Can you vaporize people? ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ The United States Army is developing a powerful new laser weapon capable of rapidly firing metal-vaporizing pulses, much like a machine gun.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ The new weapon, called the Tactical Ultrashort Pulsed Laser for Army Platforms, is expected to be about a million times stronger than any other laser weapon out there, New Scientist reports. Based on the military's plans for the weapon, the laser will more closely resemble the sorts of laser rifles in science fiction movies than anything engineers have built in the past.⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ Click the link in our bio to read the full story. ⁠⁠ ⁠⁠ #futurism #army #military #weapons #usarmy #weapontech #vaporize #laser #science #sciencefiction #scifi #news