Lifeboat Foundation

Analysis of data obtained over the past two weeks by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) investigation team shows the spacecraft’s kinetic impact with its target asteroid, Dimorphos, successfully altered the asteroid’s orbit. This marks humanity’s first time purposely changing the motion of a celestial object and the first full-scale demonstration of asteroid deflection technology. Images such as the below helped scientists understand the orbit change resulting from DART’s impact.

Bull’s-eye: NASA’s DART craft successfully changed the orbit of the asteroid Dimorphos by colliding into the rocky body two weeks ago, according to the space agency.

The test shows humanity has the capability to stop an asteroid from hitting the planet, NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a Tuesday press conference (Opens in a new window). “If an Earth-threatening asteroid was discovered, and we can see it far enough away, this technique could be used to deflect it,” he added.

Continue reading “NASA’s DART Craft Successfully Knocked Asteroid Into a New Orbit” »

Humans managed to alter an asteroid’s path through space.

NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) successfully moved an asteroid, space agency officials confirmed on Tuesday, October 11.

The woman transferred 4.4 million yen after the scammer promised to marry her after returning to Earth.

A 65-year-old Japanese woman was scammed online by a scammer claiming to be a Russian astronaut onboard the International Space Station (ISS), Vice.

With the rise in internet usage, the number of online scams has also increased considerably. At Interesting Engineering, we report the latest crypto-scams so that people do not fall for them in their attempts to connect with the new-age technology.

During his maiden voyage to space, “Star Trek” icon William Shatner had an awe-inspiring experience — but it wasn’t necessarily positive.

“So, I went to space,” reads a Variety-published excerpt from Shatner’s new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder.”

After describing the exhilarating launch procedure and beginning of his zero-gravity excursion, Shatner wrote that when he turned around to look into the void of space, he was shocked by the emptiness he found.

But this is only one half of the story, as metal-poor stars within the Milky Way may also have come from smaller dwarf galaxies that smashed into and merged with our galaxy throughout its life. By examining these stars’ paths through space while retaining only those that didn’t veer out into the metal-poor regions of the galaxy, the researchers were able to separate out the stars that form the ancient heart from the stars that originated in a dwarf galaxy.

This left researchers with some of the original skeleton of stars around which the Milky Way grew — a population they estimate to be between 50 million to 200 million times as massive as our own sun. As heavier stars die faster than smaller ones, the remaining stars are on average around 1.5 times lighter than the sun, according to the researchers.

“These stars make up about half of the total stellar mass once born,” Rix said. “So, about half of the stars [from the protogalaxy] survive to date.”

ABC News’ photo editors have assembled a collection of some of the most stunning images taken of outer space. A photo of aurora australis or the southern lights taken aboard the International Space Station, June 13, 2019.

Inspired by insects, robotic engineers are creating machines that could aid in search and rescue, pollinate plants and sniff out gas leaks.

Cyborg cockroaches that find earthquake survivors. A “robofly” that sniffs out gas leaks. Flying lightning bugs that pollinate farms in space.

These aren’t just buzzy ideas, they’re becoming reality.

Continue reading “Cyborg cockroaches are coming, and they just want to help” »

Francis Heylighen started his career as yet another physicist with a craving to understand the foundations of the universe – the physical and philosophical laws that make everything tick. But his quest for understanding has led him far beyond the traditional limits of the discipline of physics. Currently he leads the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) at the Free University of Brussels, a position involving fundamental cybernetics research cutting across almost every discipline. Among the many deep ideas he has pursued in the last few decades, one of the most tantalizing is that of the Global Brain – the notion that the social, computational and communicative matrix increasingly enveloping us as technology develops, may possess a kind of coherent intelligence in itself.

I first became aware of Francis and his work in the mid-1990s via the Principia Cybernetica project – an initiative to pursue the application of cybernetic theory to modern computer systems. Principia Cybernetica began in 1989, as a collaboration between Heylighen, Cliff Joslyn, and the late great Russian physicist, dissident and systems theorist Valentin Turchin. And then 1993, very shortly after Tim Berners-Lee released the HTML/HTTP software framework and thus created the Web, the Principia Cybernetica website went online. For a while after its 1993 launch, Principia Cybernetica was among the largest and most popular sites on the Web. Today the Web is a different kind of place, but Principia Cybernetica remains a unique and popular resource for those seeking deep, radical thinking about the future of technology, mind and society.