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Electric-vehicle startup Fisker said on Wednesday it was cutting the prices of its 2023 electric Ocean SUV model, signaling an attempt by the cash-strapped firm to drum up demand and ease concerns regarding its uncertain future. The company slashed the price tag of the entry level version - Ocean Sport - by around 36%, or $14,000, bringing it down to $24,999 from $38,999 earlier. The company said it will reduce the price of the top-end version of the vehicle, called "Extreme", by around 39%, or $24,000, to $37,499. Fisker also cut the price of its Ocean Ultra version to $34,999...

In all of physical law, there’s arguably no principle more sacrosanct than the second law of thermodynamics — the notion that entropy, a measure of disorder, will always stay the same or increase. “If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations,” wrote the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. “If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found...

Nanfang Yu, assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia Engineering, and colleagues from the University of Zürich and the University of Washington, have discovered two key strategies that enable Saharan silver ants to stay cool in one of the hottest terrestrial environments on Earth. Yu's team is the first to demonstrate that the ants use a coat of uniquely shaped hairs to control electromagnetic waves over an extremely broad range from the solar spectrum (visible and near-infrared) to the thermal radiation spectrum (mid-infrared), and that different physical mechanisms are used in different spectral bands to realize the same biological function...

2 Futures Can Explain Time's Mysterious Past New theories suggest the big bang was not the beginning, and that we may live in the past of a parallel universe December 8, 2014 |By Lee Billings In the evolution of cosmic structure, is entropy or gravity the more dominant force? The answer to this question has deep implications for the universe's future, as well as its past. Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 TeamPhysicists have a problem with time.   Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s...

A New Physics Theory of Life Katherine Taylor for Quanta MagazineJeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life. By: Natalie WolchoverJanuary 22, 2014 Comments (151) print Why does life exist?Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as...

A modification to one of the most fundamental laws of physics may provide a link to the rise of intelligence, cooperation - even upright walking. The idea of entropy describes the way in which the Universe heads inexorably toward a higher state of disorder. A mathematical model in Physical Review Letters proposes that systems maximise entropy in the present and the future. Simple simulations based on the idea reproduce a variety of real-world cases that reflect intelligent behaviour. The idea of entropy is fundamentally an intuitive one - that the Universe tends in general to a more disordered state. But...

Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It? To save lives and reduce costs, there would be tremendous advantage if science had a way to stop a devastating hurricane like Sandy. And scientists have thought of it before. One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission. The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm's convection current. Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some...

This is generating many comments, see below for an update!Behind the scenes some skeptics are suggesting that CO2 can’t warm us because the atmosphere is colder than the planet, and  it would break the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (see Postma*, for example, p 6 – 7). I disagree. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics applies to net flows of heat, not to each individual photon, and it does not prevent some heat flowing from a cooler body to a warm one. Imagine three blocks of metal side by side. They are 11°C, 10°C, and 9°C. Think about what happens to the...

There are many that believe bikinis are the world's greatest scientific breakthroughs. Many believe that Quaaludes should be brought back. Then there is the world wide favorite, beer, wine, and thermoses. Whoopie cushions, helmets that hold two beer cans, soda cans, (strangely) flying squirrels, the Spork, and reclining chairs. Then there's toilet paper, sunglasses, the fork, air conditioner, paper, the refrigerator, the printing press, and electricity. All are lifestyle accoutrements that make living easier and more enjoyable. But in actuality, the truly brilliant discoveries transcend culture, lifestyle, and Preparation H (no matter how highly recommended). Below are listed and described...

The latest theories on the nature and origin of gravity are generating lots of interest from those looking to unify the various systems (Einsteinian, Newtonian, Quantum, String Theory) of looking at our universe, and bringing to the forefront the importance of the second law of thermodynamics as an organizing principle in our universe. The problem is that the second law of thermodynamics and evolution are pretty much incompatible, as EC explains...

So, this paper was published recently in Science Magazine: Complementary Active Sites Cause Size-Selective Reactivity of Aluminum Cluster Anions with Water The reactions of metal clusters with small molecules often depend on cluster size. The selectivity of oxygen reactions with aluminum cluster anions can be well described within an electronic shell model; however, not all reactions are subject to the same fundamental constraints. We observed the size selectivity of aluminum cluster anion reactions with water, which can be attributed to the dissociative chemisorption of water at specific surface sites. The reactivity depends on geometric rather than electronic shell structure. Identical...

By viewing evolution as the motion of energy flows toward a stationary state (entropy), evolution can be explained by the second law of thermodynamics, a law which conventionally describes physical systems. In this view, a cheetah serves as an energy transfer mechanism, and beneficial mutations allow the animal to transfer more energy within its environment, helping even out the energy.

A Second Look at the Second Law Granville Sewell Mathematics Dept. Texas A&M University Can ANYTHING Happen in an Open System? In the current debate over "Intelligent Design," the strongest argument offered by opponents of design is this: we have scientific explanations for most everything else in Nature, what is special about evolution? The layman understands quite well that explaining the appearance of human brains is a very different sort of problem from finding the causes of earthquakes; however, to express this difference in terms a scientist can understand requires a discussion of the second law of thermodynamics. The first...

... the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics alone could rearrange the fundamental particles of nature into spaceships, nuclear power plants, and computers, connected to laser printers, CRTs, keyboards and the Internet, appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics in a spectacular way. Anyone who has made such an argument is familiar with the standard reply: the Earth is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and order can increase in an open system, as long as it is "compensated" somehow by a comparable or greater decrease outside the system. S. Angrist and L. Hepler,...

Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic? A thermodynamics professor gave his graduate students a take home exam. It had one question: "Is hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with a proof." Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or some variant to show either that hell was exothermic (generating heat faster than it is lost, resulting in a buildup of heat) or endothermic (generating heat slower than it is lost, resulting in a loss of heat). One student, however, wrote the following: First we must postulate that if souls exist, then they must have some...

Can the Monist View Explain “What Is Life? by Alamo-Girl and betty boop In this article we would like to address the soundness and adequacy of the monist view of reality which conceives of “all that there is” as ultimately reducible to the concept of “matter in its motions.” This view holds that there is no essential difference between living and non-living systems in nature since both ultimately are expressions of the workings of the physical laws and only the physical laws. This insight or expectation leads one to presume that the laws of physics and chemistry are entirely sufficient...

ROCKET SCIENCE Solar Sailing Breaks Laws Of Physics London - Jul 03, 2003 maybe a case of a little too much writer's licence London - Jul 03, 2003 The next generation of spacecraft propulsion systems could be dead in the water before they are even launched. A physicist is claiming that solar sailing- the idea of using sunlight to blow spacecraft across the solar system- is at odds with the laws of thermal physics reports New Scientist this Saturday. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are developing solar sails and, although never tested, the concept is quite simple. A...

Anti-gravity propulsion comes ‘out of the closet’ By Nick Cook, JDW Aerospace Consultant. LondonBoeing, the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer, has admitted it is working on experimental anti-gravity projects that could overturn a century of conventional aerospace propulsion technology if the science underpinning them can be engineered into hardware.As part of the effort, which is being run out of Boeing’s Phantom Works advanced research and development facility in Seattle, the company is trying to solicit the services of a Russian scientist who claims he has developed anti-gravity devices in Russia and Finland. The approach, however, has been thwarted by Russian officialdom.The...

The Second Law Can be Beat One of the most important principles of physics, that disorder, or entropy, always increases, has been shown to be untrue. .... A few years ago, a tentative theoretical solution to this paradox was proposed - the so-called Fluctuation Theorem - stating that the chances of the Second Law being violated increases as the system in question gets smaller. This means that at human scales, the Second Law dominates and machines only ever run in one direction. However, when working at molecular scales and over extremely short periods of time, things can take place in...

Going against the flowHeat can flow without temperature differences - but thermodynamics remains intact.25 June 2002PHILIP BALL With the right rachet, heat can flow from one hot place to another © Getty Images Physicists have devised a way to dodge one of the most fundamental laws of nature: the fact that heat flows only from hot to cold. At face value, it implies they have invented a never-ending source of energy. Well they haven't - but it could provide a method for carrying out unheard-of chemical reactions.By imagining two chambers containing particles, Souvik Das of St Stephen's College in...