Lifeboat Foundation

With the help of the CHEOPS space telescope an international team of European astronomers managed to clearly identify the existence of four new exoplanets. The four mini-Neptunes are smaller and cooler, and more difficult to find than the so-called Hot Jupiter exoplanets which have been found in abundance. Two of the four resulting papers are led by researchers from the University of Bern and the University of Geneva who are also members of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS.

CHEOPS is a joint mission by the European Space Agency (ESA) and Switzerland, under the leadership of the University of Bern in collaboration with the University of Geneva. Since its launch in December 2019, the extremely precise measurements of CHEOPS have contributed to several key discoveries in the field of exoplanets.

NCCR PlanetS members Dr. Solène Ulmer-Moll of the Universities of Bern and Geneva, and Dr. Hugh Osborn of the University of Bern, exploited the unique synergy of CHEOPS and the NASA satellite TESS, in order to detect a series of elusive exoplanets. The planets, called TOI 5,678 b and HIP 9,618 c respectively, are the size of Neptune or slightly smaller with 4.9 and 3.4 Earth radii.

Plants modified to grow in the dark could also provide fresh produce in extreme environments on Earth.

Matter in space can arise out of what we perceive as nothing. But there is no such thing as a void in the Universe.

Imagine the possibility of life forms on other planets that don’t resemble any on Earth. What might they look like, and why would they be so different?

Juan Pérez-Mercader says it may be possible and the answer may be that they developed from a different type of chemistry. For more than 10 years, the senior research fellow in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences and the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard has studied how to produce synthetic living systems—without relying on biochemistry, or the chemistry that has enabled life on Earth.

“We have been trying to build a non-biochemical system, which unaided is capable of executing the essential properties common to all natural living systems,” Pérez-Mercader explained.

Launched in 1977, NASA’s Voyager probes continue their exploration, pushing the boundaries of human understanding. Earlier this year, NASA faced an unsettling situation when Voyager 1, second of the pair to be launched, began sending back distorted communications. This sparked worries about a significant system failure in the spacecraft, now 45 years into its journey. However, NASA recently reported that it had successfully rectified the problem, which in turn has uncovered another mystery to investigate.

Voyager 1’s journey began with a “Grand Tour” of the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — enabled by a unique planetary alignment. After its journey past Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 outran its twin, Voyager 2, eventually becoming the first man-made object to leave the solar system in 2012.

The trouble began when NASA detected issues with the craft’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), responsible for ensuring the probe’s antenna stays pointed towards Earth. Failure of this system could result in a permanent loss of communication with the aging explorer. While this system returned scrambled updates, the probe was still transmitting valuable data, signaling that something was amiss.

The BEC phenomenon was first predicted by Satyendra Bose and Albert Einstein: when a given number of identical Bose particles approach each other sufficiently closely, and move sufficiently slowly, they will collectively convert to the lowest energy state: a BEC. This occurs when atoms are chilled to very low temperatures. The wavelike nature of atoms allows them to spread out and even overlap. If the density is high enough, and the temperature low enough (mere billionths of degrees above absolute zero), the atoms will behave like the photons in a laser: they will be in a coherent state and constitute a single “super atom.”

JILA’s Carl Wieman (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Eric Cornell (NIST) first started searching for a BEC around 1990 with a combination laser and magnetic cooling apparatus. Wieman pioneered the use of $200 diode lasers (the same type used in CD players) instead of the $150,000 lasers other groups were using. His approach was initially met with skepticism by his colleagues, but when he began to report real progress, several other groups joined the race to achieve the first BEC. Beginning with rubidium gas atoms at room temperature, the JILA team first slowed the rubidium and captured it in a trap created by laser light. This cooled the atoms to about 10 millionths of a degree above absolute zero—still far too hot to produce a BEC.

Once trapped, the lasers are turned off and the atoms are held in place by a magnetic field. The atoms are further cooled in the magnetic trap by selecting the hottest atoms and kicking them out of the trap. Then came the tricky part: trapping a sufficiently high density of atoms at temperatures that were cold enough to produce a BEC. To do this, Wieman and his colleagues had to devise a time-averaged orbiting potential trap (an improvement to the standard magnetic trap).

The U.S. Navy has awarded Mira a $700,000 contract, while another agreement is set in stone with the U.S. Air Force.

Right on the heels of unveiling its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, Apple has now confirmed that it has acquired Mira, a Los Angeles-based maker of light hardware for augmented reality, The Verge.

The Worldwide Developers Conference had unveiled Apple’s plans for its future as it revealed a string of devices powered by ‘homegrown’ chips and the much-awaited foray into the mixed reality space.

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But the Boom Overture is not Concorde 2.0. It’ll be faster, quieter and more fuel efficient, with a larger interior space.