Lifeboat Foundation

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter took an incredibly detailed image of the Sun as it passed with 50 million kilometers.

What could possibly go wrong?

If only the American Indians had let Europe know of all their free land, and natural resources sooner…

Calling all beings.

Continue reading “NASA is about to broadcast a message to the universe. Should they?” »

What follows is one of the most fascinating and eye-opening conversations I’ve had about crypto. We cover America’s casino mindset, the echoes of the financial crisis she’s sensing right now, how to regulate crypto, and how to innovate without exploiting others. Allen offers a lacerating but level-headed criticism of the space that is well worth your time.

Charlie Warzel: Your essay is about DeFi, or decentralized finance. Like a lot of terminology in the crypto space, DeFi is pretty broad and vague but also very much accepted in the lexicon. How do you define it?

Hilary J. Allen: Like any evolving space, the terminology is hard to pin down. People inside the crypto world have different definitions for DeFi and would probably argue with mine. But the way I think of DeFi is as a way to describe any analogue of traditional financial-service transactions—loans, deposits, etc.—that are provided using technological tools like the blockchain or facilitated through smart contracts or stablecoins. The technology is what is different, but the financial transactions are very much similar to traditional finance.

NASA is experimenting with making lenses with liquid in space, which could lead to giant space telescopes 100x the size of the James Webb.

Using a “laser pincer,” scientists can generate their own antimatter, simulations show.

An international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab, allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star.

This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world.

Continue reading “Physicists Found a Way to Mimic Neutron Stars in the Lab” »

Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy: Seeing Starbase ‘gives you a lot of ideas of what the future could be’

COLORADO SPRINGS – Brig. Gen. Stephen Purdy was in Boca Chica, Texas, last month visiting Starbase. That is SpaceX’s launch and rocket manufacturing and testing facility where the company hopes to operate Starship, the largest rocket ever built.

Purdy is the commander of Florida’s Eastern Range and also serves as the Space Force’s program executive officer for assured access to space, a new post within the Space Systems Command overseeing launch services procurement for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.

NASA’s Kepler space telescope has spotted a Jupiter look-alike in a new discovery, even though the instrument stopped operations four years ago.

An international team of astrophysicists using NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which ceased operations in 2018, have discovered an exoplanet similar to Jupiter located 17,000 light-years from Earth, making it the farthest exoplanet ever found by Kepler. The exoplanet, officially designated K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, was spotted in data captured by Kepler in 2016. Throughout its lifetime, Kepler observed over 2,700 now-confirmed planets.

An exoplanet a whopping 17,000 light-years from Earth has been found hiding in data collected by the now-retired Kepler Space Telescope.

It’s the most distant world ever picked up by the planet-hunting observatory, twice the distance of its previous record. Fascinatingly, the exoplanet is almost an exact twin of Jupiter – of similar mass, and orbiting at almost the same distance as Jupiter’s distance from the Sun.

Named K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, it represents the first exoplanet confirmed from a 2016 data run that detected 27 possible objects using a technique called gravitational microlensing rather than Kepler’s primary detection method. The discovery has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and is available on preprint server arXiv.

Cockroaches have been on Earth far longer than humans and may outlast us. Here are a few reasons why.