Lifeboat Foundation

See why history may hang in the balance on this critical launch attempt.

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Continue reading “Starship Launch Set 8am 17 Apr 23 Historic Launch Attempt” »

A lightning bolt that struck a tree on Florida’s west coast has produced a fascinating type of phosphorus material we haven’t seen on Earth before: one that could represent a whole new mineral group, bridging the gap between space minerals and minerals found on Earth.

The material, which is a close match for calcium phosphite (CaHPO₃), was found trapped inside a fulgurite – a “metal glob” formed by the reaction of the ultra-hot lightning bolt with the sand around the roots of its target.

These ‘fossilized lightning’ fulgurites often occur when lightning strikes certain types of sand, silica, and rock. What’s much less common is to find something so unique hidden inside one of these structures.

Vrgineers and Advanced Realtime Tracking demonstrate the combination of XTAL 3 headset and SMARTTRACK3/M in a mixed reality pilot trainer. The partnership between these two technological companies started in 2018. At IT2EC 2023 in Rotterdam, the integrated SMARTTRACK3/M into an F-35-like Classroom Trainer manufactured and delivered to USAF and RAF will be for display. This unique combination of the latest ART infrared all-in-one hardware and Vrgineers algorithms for cockpit motion compensation creates an unseen immersion for every mixed reality training. One of the challenges in next-generation pilot training using virtual technology and motion platforms is the alignment of the pilot’s position in the cockpit. By overcoming this issue, the simulator industry is moving forward to eliminate the disadvantages of simulated training.

“We are continuously working on removing the technological challenges of modern simulators, one of which is caused by front-facing camera position distance from users’ eyes. We are developing advanced algorithms for motion compensation to minimize the shift between virtual and physical scene, making experience realistic. The durability and compact size of SMARTTRACK3/M, which was optimized for using in cockpits, allows us as training device integrator to make it a comprehensive part of a simulation,” says Marek Polcak, CEO of Vrgineers.

“This is the application SMARTTRACK3/M was designed for., We have taken the proven hardware from the SMARTTRACK3 and adapted it to the limited space available. As a result, we have the precision and the reliability of a seasoned system in a form factor fitting to simulator cockpits” says Andreas Werner, business development manager for simulations at ART.

Beyond our own Milky Way galaxy, there are physical limits on our access to the Universe. In this new video from PBS Space Time, we explore the absolute limit of our future view of the Universe, and of the Universe’s ability to influence us.

We humans have always been explorers. The great civilisations that have arisen across the world are owed to our restless ancestors. These days, there’s not much of Earth left to explore. But if we look up, there’s a whole Universe out there waiting for us. Future generations may one day explore the cosmos and could even settle entire other galaxies.

Continue reading “How much of the Universe can humanity reach?” »

Bedrock allows its users to build and scale generative AI applications like chatbots.

Becoming the latest actor to join the generative AI space race, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched Bedrock. Not to be confused with OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard which are AI-powered chatbots.

What Bedrock does is allowing users to build and scale generative AI applications such as chatbots, text generation, image generation using language prompts, etc. There’s a range of pre-trained models that the users can customize and embed their own data into and then integrate and deploy in applications using the AWS tools.

Today, most of the universe’s galaxies are already receding faster than the speed of light.

The robot tasked with making bricks out of lunar soil will be launched during China’s Chang’e-8 mission around 2028.

With Artemis II set to launch on November 24, it is no surprise that science journals are buzzing with research on lunar regolith, building bases on the moon, and working with moon soil to grow plants… you get the drift.

A recent study in the journal Communications Biology described an experiment in which the moon soil samples collected during the Apollo missions were used to grow plants. And for the first time, an Earth plant, Arabidopsis thaliana, commonly called thale cress, grew and thrived in the lunar soil samples during the experiment.

The protoplanet was found surrounding HD 169,142, a star located 374 light years from our solar system.

Astronomers have caught a rare glimpse of a planet’s formation. This is only the third time scientists have discovered a protoplanet — an early stage in forming a planet, where cosmic material clumps in a disk surrounding newborn stars.

The observation of new protoplanet.

Continue reading “Astronomers confirm presence of third protoplanet about 374 light years away” »

West Australian researchers have developed a breakthrough method to measure the brain fluid pressure in humans, which may reduce vision damage experienced by astronauts on long-haul space flights.

A cross-disciplinary team from the Lions Eye Institute and the International Space Centre at The University of Western Australia has developed a clever technique to measure the pressure in the brain fluid, the study was published in Nature in npj Microgravity.