Lifeboat Foundation

Lecturer: Prof. Michael Silberstein.
Department of Philosophy.
Elizabethtown College.
Title: Neutral Monism: Reintegrating Space, Time and Conscious Experience.
Date: 22 October 2018

This is a recorded talk of the online seminar “Progress and Visions in the Scientific Study of the Mind-Matter Relation”.

We may have the first concrete evidence of ‘mind-blowing’ Trojan exoplanets.

An international team of astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to find what they believe is a ‘sibling’ alien world to an exoplanet orbiting a distant star.

The team detected a cloud of debris that may be sharing the planet’s orbit and could be the building blocks of a new planet or the remnants of one in the process of forming a press statement reveals.

From comets to nebulas to the Milky Way, the shots shortlisted in the annual competition capture the beauty of the cosmos from Earth.

K. Miller, Caltech/IPAC

White dwarfs are the burnt-out cores of dead stars that may have once resembled our sun.

Astronomers from the University of Washington in Seattle and elsewhere have conducted Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of the nearby Fireworks Galaxy. Results of the observational campaign, presented July 10 on the preprint server arXiv, yield crucial insights into the recent star formation history of this galaxy.

Discovered in 1,798, the Fireworks Galaxy (also known as NGC 6946) is a nearby face-on star forming spiral galaxy located some 25.5 million light years away. The galaxy has a size of 87,300 light years and its name was coined due to an unusually large number of supernovae observed in it—about ten times more than in the Milky Way.

Although many studies of the Fireworks Galaxy have been conducted to date, its star formation rate (SFR) is not well constrained, estimated to be between three and 12 solar masses per year. This discrepancy is mainly due to the diverse methods of measuring star formation rate and the wide range of different distances used.

A California filmmaker says because Wyoming is the first state to celebrate July 20 as Moon Landing Day in recognition of the historic 1969 Apollo 11 mission, he plans to build an Apollo 11 monument here.

The galactic bulge at the heart of the Milky Way is haunted by the ghosts of dead stars spread out as a mysterious arrangement of planetary nebulas.

Flying cars. Space tourism. Safe reentry for astronauts coming back from Mars.

These technologies are still science fiction, but some won’t be for much longer, according to Charles “Mike” Fremaux, NASA Langley Research Center’s chief engineer for intelligent flight systems.

To test these concepts, particularly in regard to public and military safety, NASA Langley is building its first new wind tunnel in over 40 years. The NASA Flight Dynamic Research Facility, a project Fremaux has been pursuing for 25 years, will replace two smaller wind tunnels that are around 80 years old. The center’s most recent and largest, the National Transonic Facility, was built in 1980.

This could help us improve our understanding of the Sun and its impact on space weather.

A collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Graz in Austria and the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia used artificial intelligence (AI) to study the magnetic field in the upper atmosphere of the Sun, a press release said.

The solar magnetic field is a poorly understood area of research among astronomers. Even after centuries of watching the Sun, we only have limited information about how sunspots are formed or whether they will lead to events like a flare or a coronal mass ejection (CME).