Sci-sexual

Dava Newman is a truly EPIC scientist and engineer. She was the deputy administrator of NASA from 2015-2017 but that's just scratching the surface of her achievements, discoveries and design accomplishments.

Newman conducted countless experiments regarding human performance in microgravity, even designing a suite of instruments to see the short and long-term stress a body takes in spaceflight.

She also studied the effects of different kinds of pressure on our bodies. This led her to design the Biosuit, where pressure is applied from the material directly to an astronaut's skin, rather than having a gas be in between. This spacesuit would be far more maneuverable (not to mention golden age-scifi sexy!) than the classic design, which would be infinitely better for spacewalks, repairs in microgravity, and eventual sorties on Mars and the moon. Hence one of the 300+ papers she published, “Probability of Spacesuit-Induced Fingernail Trauma is associated with Hand Circumference".

Alexandre Obertelli and a component of his PUMA project - antiProton Unstable Matter Annihilation. Or the giant antimatter bottle! How do you trap antimatter in a bottle made of matter, if the two will annihilate each other when they touch?

CERN can store antimatter for a long time, but in order to study specific effects upon its annihilation with radioactive isotopes (but otherwise regular matter), they need an ion beam located in a separate facility. The isotopes created at ISOLDE decay too quickly for transport to CERN.

Enter the PUMA project, which is an antimatter trap and storage device designed to keep the antimatter from touching the walls. The trap is a powerful superconducting solenoid magnet and an extreme vacuum (10 to the -17 millibars) and will be kept at only 4K. This keeps the antimatter at very low energies, and the magnetic field keeps it away from the walls. There's a storage section and then a section where the annihilation will take place, with specific sensors to measure the results. It will hold 1 billion antiprotons.

This kind of device may change the future of antimatter study by opening the door for new kinds of experiments, combining the creation of antimatter with all different kinds of equipment located at other sites.

Gian Giudice, the foxy head of the theoretical department at CERN, among many other illustrious qualities.

He calculated that the our universe may be on a knife-edge of existence in only a local minimum. That the higgs field can quantum tunnel into the next lower-energy minimum, creating a rapidly-expanding bubble that spreads like wildfire through the whole universe. Within this bubble, the forces that are responsible for matter as we know it can no longer work together. We won't even see it coming. It could be happening right now.

The tool for the development of materials at a quantum scale at the University of Waterloo in Canada. It has two kinds of thin-film deposition processes that allow for single-crystal thin layers of material to be created for use in consumer and research-grade electronics, such as superconductors.

It's a powerful, complex, and very expensive tool. But take a second to appreciate the beauty of it. That most of the steel parts for the vacuum chambers are probably custom made with CNC machines that are wonders of a different sort. That this tool was designed to directly manipulate matter on a scale that humans have known of for just over a century.