Lifeboat Foundation

If the U.S. is going to do more work in cold weather climates to deter malign activity from Russia and China, one Air Force general says it will need more equipment to operate full-time in the South Pole.

Pacific Air Forces commander Gen. Charles Q. Brown said Tuesday he’d like to see a boost in “some of the capability we have, but don’t have a lot of.”

“Icebreakers, for example. LC-130s? There’s not a lot of those,” Brown said during a speech at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies in Arlington, Virginia.

Scientists unearth ancient Papua New Guinea artifacts in the highlands of the island that settle a longstanding archaeological argument regarding the emergence of complex culture on the island.

About 10,000 years ago, the climate changed to better suit the planting of crops and the Neolithic revolution that brought about agriculture emerged in different parts of the world at different times. In Europe and Asia it is known that at this time cultural complexity developed as people began settling and living together on farms.

Continue reading “5000-Year-Old Papua New Guinea Artifacts Rewrite Neolithic History” »

Elon Musk praised Tesla’s team for the Model Y’s heat pump — a feature that could make the electric SUV much more efficient in colder climates.

Last week, Tesla started deliveries of the Model Y, its fourth vehicle in the current lineup and fifth model ever.

Continue reading “Elon Musk: Tesla Model Y heat pump is some of the best engineering I’ve seen in a while” »

In 2018, Putin approved a national research strategy that stretches to 2024. It calls for more money, extra support for early-career scientists, and some 900 new laboratories, including at least 15 world-class research centres with a focus on mathematics, genomics, materials research and robotics. Last year, the government completed a sweeping evaluation of scientific performance at its universities and institutes; it has vowed to modernize equipment in the 300 institutes that made the top quartile. And it says it wants to strengthen previously neglected areas, including climate and environmental research (see ‘Russia’s climate-science ambitions’).

Some researchers see promise in planned reforms.

This grim vision of a possible future comes from the latest studies about how nuclear war could alter world climate. They build on long-standing work about a ‘nuclear winter’ — severe global cooling that researchers predict would follow a major nuclear war, such as thousands of bombs flying between the United States and Russia. But much smaller nuclear conflicts, which are more likely to occur, could also have devastating effects around the world.

As geopolitical tensions rise in nuclear-armed states, scientists are modelling the global impact of nuclear war.

Circa 2017 o.o

Lightning is nuts. It’s a supercharged bolt of electricity extending from the sky to the ground that can kill people. But it can also produce nuclear reactions, according to new research.

Scientists have long known that thunderstorms can produce high-energy radiation, like this one from December, 2015 that blasted a Japanese beach town with some gamma radiation. But now, another team of researchers in Japan are reporting conclusive evidence of these gamma rays setting off atom-altering reactions like those in a nuclear reactor.

The incredible shot of the rare phenomenon, captured above Calbuco volcano in southern Chile, won first prize in “The Perfect Moment” photo competition.

The Deep Space Climate Observatory – a satellite that warns of incoming space storms that could knacker telecommunications on Earth – is up and running again after being shut down for eight months by a technical glitch.

Launched in 2015 aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the bird, known as DSCOVR for short, was sent into orbit between the Earth and the Sun. Circling at a distance of about a million miles away from terra firma, satellite sports instruments designed to detect approaching geomagnetic storms, and alerts us before highly energetic particles from the solar wind pelt our planet.

Humans have been studying electric charge for thousands of years, and the results have shaped modern civilization. Our daily lives depend on electric lighting, smartphones, cars, and computers, in ways that the first individuals to take note of a static shock or a bolt of lightning could never have imagined.

Now, physicists at Northeastern have discovered a new way to manipulate electric charge. And the changes to the future of our technology could be monumental.

“When such phenomena are discovered, imagination is the limit,” says Swastik Kar, an associate professor of physics. “It could change the way we can detect and communicate signals. It could change the way we can sense things and the storage of information, and possibilities that we may not have even thought of yet.”