Lifeboat Foundation

Early on Thursday morning, Hurricane Nicole made landfall near Vero Beach on Florida’s eastern coast. Because Nicole had a very large eye, nearly 60 miles in diameter, its strongest winds were located well to the north of this landfalling position.

As a result of this, Kennedy Space Center took some of the most intense wind gusts from Nicole late on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. While such winds from a Category 1 hurricane are unlikely to damage facilities, they are of concern because the space agency left its Artemis I mission—consisting of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft—exposed on a pad at Launch Complex-39B. The pad is a stone’s throw from the Atlantic Ocean.

How intense were the winds? The National Weather Service hosts data from NASA sensors attached to this launch pad’s three lighting towers on a public website. It can be a little difficult to interpret the readings because there are sensors at altitudes varying from 132 feet to 457 feet. Most of the publicly available data appears to come from an altitude of about 230 feet, however, which would represent the area of the Space Launch System rocket where the core stage is attached to the upper stage. The entire stack reaches a height of about 370 feet above the ground.

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Giant Stars are often considered too hot and short lived to colonize, but it may be that they shall be the most powerful and pivotal systems in a future galaxy.

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Continue reading “Colonizing Giant Stars” »

When you need someone to narrate the history of the universe — and Mel Brooks is busy — you might as well go with Morgan Freeman. Not only has Freeman played God in “Bruce Almighty” and “Evan Almighty,” but he’s also told “The Story of God” and “The Story of Us” for National Geographic.

In “Our Universe,” Freeman is lending his voice to a new six-part nature documentary series for Netflix. As the title implies, this series is even bigger in scope than “The Story of Us.” It’s looking back at the whole history of the universe and how 13.8 billion years have led us to this moment.

Continue reading “Our Universe Trailer: Morgan Freeman Narrates The History Of Everything” »

Everything in the Universe has gravity – and feels it too. Yet this most common of all fundamental forces is also the one that presents the biggest challenges to physicists.

Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity has been remarkably successful in describing the gravity of stars and planets, but it doesn’t seem to apply perfectly on all scales.

General relativity has passed many years of observational tests, from Eddington’s measurement of the deflection of starlight by the Sun in 1919 to the recent detection of gravitational waves.

face_with_colon_three circa 2012.

It is shown that the idea of a photon rocket through the complete annihilation of matter with antimatter, first proposed by Sänger, is not a utopian scheme as it is widely believed. Its feasibility appears to be possible by the radiative collapse of a relativistic high current pinch discharge in a hydrogen–antihydrogen ambiplasma down to a radius determined by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Through this collapse to ultrahigh densities the proton–antiproton pairs in the center of the pinch can become the upper gigaelectron volt laser level for the transition into a coherent gamma ray beam by proton–antiproton annihilation, with the magnetic field of the collapsed pinch discharge absorbing the recoil momentum of the beam and transmitting it by the Moessbauer effect to the spacecraft. The gamma ray laser beam is launched as a photon avalanche from one end of the pinch discharge channel. Because of the enormous technical problems to produce and store large amounts of anti-matter, such a propulsion concept may find its first realization in small unmanned space probes to explore nearby solar systems. The laboratory demonstration of a gigaelectron volt gamma ray laser by comparison requiring small amounts of anti-matter may be much closer.

Two neutron stars smashing together may produce a form of matter not seen before. If that happens, simulations suggest there would be a signal in gravitational waves resulting from the collision.

In 1994, the computer scientist Peter Shor discovered that if quantum computers were ever invented, they would decimate much of the infrastructure used to protect information shared online. That frightening possibility has had researchers scrambling to produce new, “post-quantum” encryption schemes, to save as much information as they could from falling into the hands of quantum hackers.

Earlier this year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology revealed four finalists in its search for a post-quantum cryptography standard. Three of them use “lattice cryptography” — a scheme inspired by lattices, regular arrangements of dots in space.

Lattice cryptography and other post-quantum possibilities differ from current standards in crucial ways. But they all rely on mathematical asymmetry. The security of many current cryptography systems is based on multiplication and factoring: Any computer can quickly multiply two numbers, but it could take centuries to factor a cryptographically large number into its prime constituents. That asymmetry makes secrets easy to encode but hard to decode.

There are calculations which say the universe weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg) and was no bigger than 10-²⁶ centimeters across before it stretched and sprawled into the great, heaving landscape we know of today. It’s strange to imagine that billions of fiery-tipped stars and billions of husky blue or rosy galaxies could emerge…

Chirality is the breaking of reflection and inversion symmetries. Simply put, it is when an object’s mirror images cannot be superimposed over each other. A common example are your two hands—while mirror images of each other, they can never overlap. Chirality appears at all levels in nature and is ubiquitous.

In addition to static chirality, chirality can also occur due to dynamic motion including rotation. With this in mind, we can distinguish true and false chirality. A system is truly chiral if—when translating—space inversion does not equate to time reversal combined with a proper spatial rotation.

Phonons are quanta (or small packets) of energy associated with the vibration of atoms in a crystal lattice. Recently, phonons with chiral properties have been theorized and experimentally discovered in two-dimensional (2D) materials such as tungsten diselenide. The discovered chiral phonons are rotating—yet not propagating—atomic motions. But, truly chiral phonons would be atomic motions that are both rotating and propagating, and these have never been observed in three-dimensional (3D) bulk systems.