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In 2016, the Japanese government announced a plan for the emergence of a new kind of society. Human civilization, the proposal explained, had begun with hunter-gatherers, passed through the agrarian and industrial stages, and was fast approaching the end of the information age. As then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe put ...

When you fire a laser at a solid-state battery, it turns out the particles inside aren’t tossed into chaos. This has surprised a team of US and UK researchers. The team has found “persistence of memory” in the ions (charged atoms) that help move electricity around a solid-state battery. The discovery improves understanding of solid-state […]

Chairman of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and Chairman of Breakthrough Initiatives, Dr. Pete Worden, discusses the Breakthrough Starshot work on the laser propelled solar sail to Proxima Centauri. Billionaire Yuri Milner committed $100 million for Breakthrough Starshot. They probably had about $10 million worth of contracts around the world to answer these three questions. 1. ... Read more

Coherently tiled titanium:sapphire laser amplification provides a relatively easy and inexpensive way to surpass the current 10-petawatt limit. “By adding a 2×2 coherently tiled titanium:sapphire high-energy laser amplifier in China’s SULF or EU’s ELI-NP, the current 10-petawatt can be further increased to 40-petawatt and the focused peak intensity can be increased by nearly 10 times ... Read more

Nextbigfuture has a weekly video review of the big stories in science and technology. The later part of the video discusses laser pushed sails for fast missions around the solar system and then interstellar missions. We have the laser technology that is sufficient to be used for laser pushed sail missions. They need to be ... Read more

In a scientific breakthrough that could reshape our understanding of how light interacts with matter, researchers from the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group at the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona have discovered a new phase of matter, aptly named a “light-matter hybrid.” The findings, publish...