Lifeboat Foundation

About 750 million people in the world do not have access to electricity at night. Solar cells provide power during the day, but saving energy for later use requires substantial battery storage.

In Applied Physics Letters, researchers from Stanford University constructed a photovoltaic cell that harvests energy from the environment during the day and night, avoiding the need for batteries altogether. The device makes use of the heat leaking from Earth back into space—energy that is on the same order of magnitude as incoming solar radiation.

At night, solar cells radiate and lose heat to the sky, reaching temperatures a few degrees below the ambient air. The device under development uses a thermoelectric module to generate voltage and current from the temperature gradient between the cell and the air. This process depends on the thermal design of the system, which includes a hot side and a cold side.

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HSE) are working with NASA scientists to develop an AI system for inspecting astronauts’ gloves.

Space is an unforgiving environment and equipment failures can be catastrophic. Gloves are particularly prone to wear and tear as they’re used for just about everything, including repairing equipment and installing new equipment.

Continue reading “AI system inspects astronauts’ gloves for damage in real-time” »

Would you like to visit a world where it rains rock?

Since astronomers began finding exoplanets in the 1990s, they’ve uncovered a lot of hot Jupiters, and now NASA’s most venerable telescope is playing meteorologist.

These colossal worlds are gas giants like our own Jupiter but orbit much closer to their parent stars — close enough that their surfaces might boil at stomach-churning temperatures above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,600 degrees Celsius). Now, the Hubble Space Telescope has pierced the veils of two different hot Jupiters, finding some rather bizarre weather, at least by the mundane standards of our solar system. These worlds are more than curiosities; they’re evidence of how a star can influence an orbiting planet’s atmosphere.

Weather predictions here on Earth are more accurate than they’ve ever been; trying to predict the behavior of our wild and wacky Sun is a little more tricky.

Case in point: according to official predictions, the current cycle of solar activity should be mild. But the gap between the prediction and what’s actually happening is pretty significant – and it’s getting wider. Sunspot counts, used as a measure for solar activity, are way higher than the predicted values calculated by the NOAA, NASA, and the International Space Environmental Service.

In fact, sunspot counts have been consistently higher than predicted levels since September 2020. This could mean that, in contrast to predictions, the Sun is in the swing of an unusually strong activity cycle.

Using the characteristic movement pattern of microbes to detect them on mars and the icy moons.

Microbial Motility.

This discovery supports a long-debated theory for how planets like Jupiter form, called “disk instability.”

A powerful radio-wave laser, called a “megamaser”, has been observed by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. The record-breaking find is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected, at about five billion light years from Earth.

The light from the megamaser has traveled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers to Earth. The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Dr. Marcin Glowacki, who previously worked at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.

Dr. Glowacki, who is now based at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia, said megamasers are usually created when two galaxies violently collide in the Universe.

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?” »