Lifeboat Foundation

A case of wine was put on the line.

This is according to a report by Science Alert published on Tuesday.

A 25-year-old wager on the source of consciousness between German-American computational neuroscientist Christof Koch and Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers has come to a close with the first one admitting defeat.

Continue reading “A brain scientist and a philosopher have resolved a 25-year-old wager on consciousness” »

Developing The Low Earth Orbit Economy On The World’s First Commercial Space Station — David Zuniga, Senior Director, In-Space Solutions, Axiom Space

David Zuniga is Senior Director of In-Space Solutions at Axiom Space (https://www.axiomspace.com/), a space infrastructure developer headquartered in Houston, Texas, which plans human spaceflight for government-funded and commercial astronauts, engaging in in-space research, in-space manufacturing, and space exploration. The company aims to own and operate the world’s first commercial space station, and Mr. Zuniga helps to develop strategy and growth around Axiom’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) economy, also playing a critical role in business and technical integration of Axiom’s in-space manufacturing and research capabilities for Axiom Station architecture.

Continue reading “David Zuniga, Senior Director, In-Space Solutions, Axiom Space — Developing Low Earth Orbit Economy” »

Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the feat using a fiber with 19 cores. That’s the largest number of cores packed into a cable with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 micrometers.

“We believe 19 cores is the highest practical number of cores or spatial channels you can have in standard cladding diameter fiber and still maintain good quality transmission,” says Georg Rademacher, who previously headed the project for NICT but who has recently returned to Germany to take up a directorship in optical communications at the University of Stuttgart.

Most fiber cables for long-distance transmission in use today are single core, single-mode glass fibers (SMF). But SMF is approaching its practical limit as network traffic rapidly increases because of AI, cloud computing, and IoT applications. Many researchers are therefore taking an interest in multicore fiber in conjunction with space-division multiplexing (SDM), a transmission technique for using multiple spatial channels in a cable.

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the protoplanetary disk around a young star have discovered the most compelling chemical evidence to date of the formation of protoplanets. The discovery will provide astronomers with an alternate method for detecting and characterizing protoplanets when direct observations or imaging are not possible. The results will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

HD 169,142 is a young star located in the constellation Sagittarius that is of significant interest to astronomers due to the presence of its large, dust-and gas-rich circumstellar disk that is viewed nearly face-on. Several protoplanet candidates have been identified over the last decade, and earlier this year, scientists at the University of Liège and Monash University confirmed that one such candidate—HD 169,142 b—is, in fact, a giant Jupiter-like protoplanet.

The discoveries revealed in a new analysis of archival data from ALMA—an international collaboration in which the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a member—may now make it easier for scientists to detect, confirm, and ultimately characterize, protoplanets forming around young stars.

Do you ever mesh your other hobbies with the space stuff? Yes. I once turned the results of one of my experiments into a musical. In 2020, during the lockdowns, I put a scientific instrument on my balcony to measure light, sound and pollution before and after the pandemic. I ended up with several graphs and thought, Why not turn these into a musical? So, me and my brother got several musical instruments and played notes according to how high or low each point on the graph was. We actually submitted that to the NASA SpaceApps COVID-19 Challenge and became one of the top six global winners.

Do you think you’ll study space science at university when you’re older? I think so. Either aerospace or astrophysics, or maybe both.

Continue reading “‘I’m really into planetary defence’: Meet the 13-year-old whose science project could protect Earth from asteroids” »

Despite our intrinsic distrust of AI in space taught to us by movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey (“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave”), it offers large advantages to both manned and unmanned missions. To that end, NASA is developing a system that will allow astronauts to perform maneuvers, conduct experiments and more using a natural-language ChatGPT-like interface, The Guardian reported.

“The idea is to get to a point where we have conversational interactions with space vehicles and they [are] also talking back to us on alerts, interesting findings they see in the solar system and beyond,” said Dr. Larissa Suzuki, speaking at an IEEE meeting on next-gen space communication. “It’s really not like science fiction anymore.”

NASA aims to deploy the system on its Lunar Gateway, a space station that will orbit the Moon and provide support for NASA’s Artemis mission. It would use a natural language interface that allows astronauts to seek advice on experiments or conduct maneuvers without diving into complex manuals.

Four volunteer crew members entered a Mars-realistic 3D printed habitat.

I would like to ruin space for everyone.

Mars Perseverance Rover struggled to collect samples from a crumbly, potentially conglomerate rock at the Onahu outcrop, before exploring another location, Stone Man Pass. Meanwhile, the rover continues to analyze nearby boulders and progress towards Jezero’s inner rim, home to the anticipated carbonate-rich “margin unit,” in pursuit of insights into Mars’ geological history.

Recently on Mars, Perseverance wrestled with sampling a crumbly rock and continued the mission’s boulder-bonanza!

Perseverance spent 3 weeks exploring the Onahu outcrop, after having previously performed an abrasion named Ouzel Falls. From this abrasion, scientists saw that the rock is most likely a conglomerate worth sampling, but was also likely to be crumbly.