Lifeboat Foundation

Over the 20th century our knowledge of the universe expanded, as did our technological ability to capture images its outer reaches. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed us to pull back the curtains on the deep limits of the universe and the new millennium promises an even higher definition imaging with the James Webb Space Telescope.

Despite ongoing delays, the JWT promises to take us even closer to the edge of time and space, delivering a new perspective on some of the oldest galaxies in the universe, potentially just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

This has opened a whole new window to physics.

This could be big.

A trio of satellites studying our planet’s magnetic field have shown details of the steady swell of a magnetic field produced by the ocean’s tides.

Four years of data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Swarm mission have contributed to the mapping of this ‘other’ magnetic field, one that could help us build better models around global warming.

Physicist Nils Olsen from the Technical University of Denmark presented the surprising results at this year’s European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, explaining how his team of researchers managed to detail such a faint signature.

Continue reading “The ESA Just Discovered a Second Magnetic Field Surrounding Our Planet” »

Researchers at Caltech have induced a range of sensations in the arm of a paralyzed man. The breakthrough comes courtesy of electrodes implanted in the brain, which stimulated the neurons to produce different feelings depending on the type of electrical signals. The team says the research could eventually lead to advanced prosthetic limbs that allow users to feel realistic sensations through them.

Plenty of exciting research is being conducted to help paralyzed people regain control of and feeling in their limbs. The NeuroLife system has helped a quadriplegic man move his arms again using just his thoughts, allowing him to perform a number of actions. Electrical nerve stimulation, both with and without electrode implants, has helped several people voluntarily move their legs again, often for the first time in years.

In this new study, Caltech researchers implanted two tiny arrays of electrodes into the somatosensory cortex, the small region of the brain responsible for the body’s sensations of movement or position, as well as cutaneous sensations such as touch, pressure and vibration.

How close are we really to space travel? Our featured contributor Lola Akinmade Åkerström talks to Space Nation, a company that’s researching both space tourism and how space technology can help us on Earth.

Thanks to Google, it can often feel like there are no mysterious places left on earth to explore—and finding new places to call the ‘final’ frontier seems increasingly difficult. Even the Pacific Ocean’s Marianna Trench, at over 36,000 feet deep and arguably the most legit final frontier on earth, has been explored by Hollywood director James Cameron in a submersible. As a result, the past few decades have seen us looking upwards to the most mysterious of places: Our own galaxy.

Blockbuster movies set in space and fictional alien encounters continue to intrigue us. Space discovery programs on TV science channels continually pique our curiosity. Even kids’ cartoons such as the 1960s American series The Jetsons brought the concept of commercial space travel closer to us, thanks to its flying space cars, pod-like apartments, and a robot maid called Rosie.

The University of Nebraska College of Law is joining forces with space and military law experts from Australia and the United Kingdom to take the lead on understanding how our Earth-bound laws will be applied in times of armed conflict in outer space.

Some of the best legal and policy minds at the University of Adelaide, UNSW Canberra, University of Exeter and Nebraska Law will draft the definitive document on military and security law as applied to space.

The Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Operations is to be completed in 2020. It will draw on the knowledge of dozens of legal and space operations experts from around the world.

Continue reading “Legal experts: Conflict in outer space will happen” »

Take any two cells from your body and there’s a good chance their genetic sequences will be a match. That is, unless you happen to have what’s referred to in the medical literature as a ‘tetragametic chimerism’ – a condition that causes separate fertilised embryos to merge into a single body.

Once thought to be rare among humans, there’s good reason to suspect we might be seeing a lot more of it in the future.

The truth is, nobody is really certain how many humans have cells in their body that once belonged to a sibling.

Continue reading “Some People Are Their Own Identical Twins, And The Science Behind That Is Fascinating” »

In the summer of 1935, the physicists Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger engaged in a rich, multifaceted and sometimes fretful correspondence about the implications of the new theory of quantum mechanics. The focus of their worry was what Schrödinger later dubbed entanglement: the inability to describe two quantum systems or particles independently, after they have interacted.

Until his death, Einstein remained convinced that entanglement showed how quantum mechanics was incomplete. Schrödinger thought that entanglement was the defining feature of the new physics, but this didn’t mean that he accepted it lightly. “I know of course how the hocus pocus works mathematically,” he wrote to Einstein on July 13, 1935. “But I do not like such a theory.” Schrödinger’s famous cat, suspended between life and death, first appeared in these letters, a byproduct of the struggle to articulate what bothered the pair.

The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one. But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles. If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.