Lifeboat Foundation

Over the past few months, I was asked multiple times by Staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability whether I am available to testify before the U.S. Congress on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). As a result, I cleared my calendar for November 13, 2024 and prepared the following written statement. At the end, I was not called to testify before Congress and so I am posting below my intended statement. The Galileo Project under my leadership is about to release this week unprecedented results from commissioning data of its unique Observatory at Harvard University. Half a million objects were monitored on the sky and their appearance was analyzed by state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Are any of them UAPs and if so — what are their flight characteristics? Unfortunately, the congressional hearing chairs chose not to hear about these scientific results, nor about the scientific findings from our ocean expedition to the site of the first reported meteor from interstellar space.

Stay tuned for the first extensive paper on the commissioning data from the first Galileo Project Observatory, to be posted publicly in the coming days. Here is my public statement.

A small asteroid burned up in Earth’s atmosphere off the coast of California just hours after being discovered and before impact monitoring systems had registered its trajectory.

Last month, an asteroid impacted Earth’s atmosphere just hours after being detected — somehow, it managed to circumvent impact monitoring systems during its approach to our planet. However, on the bright side, the object measured just 3 feet (1 meter) in diameter and posed very little threat to anything on Earth’s surface.

This asteroid, designated 2024 UQ, was first discovered on Oct. 22 by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey in Hawaii, a network of four telescopes that scan the sky for moving objects that might be space rocks on a collision course with Earth. Two hours later, the asteroid burned up over the Pacific Ocean near California, making it an “imminent impactor.”

The observation of a previously unseen photon delay in the production of quantum light has implications for the development of quantum technologies.

Physicists have been trying to design fusion reactors, technologies that can generate energy via nuclear fusion processes, for decades. The successful realization of fusion reactors relies on the ability to effectively confine charged particles with magnetic fields, as this in turn enables the control of high-energy plasma.

An international team of astronomers has discovered an instance of two galaxies aligned in a way where their gravity acts as a compound lens. The group has written a paper describing the findings and posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

Scientists can determine the mass of subatomic particles that are built from quarks by looking at the particles’ energy and momentum in four-dimensional spacetime. One of the quantities that encode this information, called the trace anomaly, is linked to the fact that physical observables from high-energy experiments depend on the energy/momentum scales involved.

Modern imaging systems, such as those used in smartphones, virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) devices, are constantly evolving to become more compact, efficient, and high-performing. Traditional optical systems rely on bulky glass lenses, which have limitations like chromatic aberrations, low efficiency at multiple wavelengths, and large physical sizes. These drawbacks present challenges when designing smaller, lighter systems that still produce high-quality images.

Adhesives are everywhere, from the tape used in households to the bonding materials in vehicles and electronics. The search for stronger, more adaptable adhesives is ongoing and may come down to adding a dash of salt to two special polymer ingredients known as polyzwitterions, or PZIs.

Addressing the challenge of controlling electronic states in materials, the scientific community has been exploring innovative methods. Recently, researchers from Peking University, led by Professor Nanlin Wang, in collaboration with Professor Qiaomei Liu and Associate Research Scientist Dong Wu, uncovered how ultrafast lasers can manipulate non-volatile, reversible control over the electronic polar states in the charge-density-wave material EuTe4 at room temperature.