Lifeboat Foundation

When Thomas Hertog was first summoned to Stephen Hawking’s office in the late 1990s, there was an instant connection between the young Belgian researcher and the legendary British theoretical physicist.

“Something clicked between us,” Hertog said.

That connection would continue even as Hawking’s debilitating disease ALS robbed him of his last ways to communicate, allowing the pair to complete a new theory that aims to turn how science looks at the universe on its head.

A planetary physicist at The University of Texas at Arlington is the lead author of a study that catalogs all known planet-hosting, triple-stellar systems—those having three or more stars with planets.

Manfred Cuntz, professor of physics, led the project, titled “An Early Catalog of Planet-hosting Multiple-star Systems of Order Three and Higher.” This study provides a thorough bibliographic assessment of planet-hosting, triple-stellar systems.

It was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplements Series. Co-authors include UTA alumni G.E. Luke, Matthew Millard and Lindsey Boyle, as well as Shaan D. Patel, a doctoral-bound graduate student.

Platooning technology is allowing lower-cost entry to the autonomous space, where its reach includes the existing truck market rather than solely on “customers who can afford to buy new trucks,” according to Kratos.

“Couple that with the increasing driver shortage and the potential multiplies,” Steve Fendley, president of Kratos Unmanned Systems Division, said in a statement.

Continue reading “Kratos to deploy more autonomous platooning trucks in Midwest” »

Supersonic airplanes are old news. But supersonic airplanes that can fly nine times the speed of sound? That’s something else.

Texas-based company Venus Aerospace is designing a passenger plane called Stargazer that’s capable of flying at Mach 9, or approximately 6,900 miles per hour — which means you’d be able to fly from New York to Sydney in less than 90 minutes. By comparison, the Concorde, which was the only supersonic passenger plane ever to fly commercially, flew at about Mach 2, or more than 1,500 miles per hour.

AI has now spread into every field of astronomy and is helping astronomers learn more about the universe at an astonishing rate.

Firing ultrasound signals into rodent brains puts them in a torpor-like state. Scientists are wondering if it could be used on humans.

Dr. Alice Agogino’s Mars robot technology finds terrestrial applications, revolutionizing disaster response and public safety with Squishy Robotics Inc.

For her NASA-funded spherical skeleton robots intended for interplanetary exploration, Dr. Alice Agogino, a famous scientist and the head of the Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, has found terrestrial applications.

The robots developed by Agogino, which were initially meant for data collection on Mars or the Moon, may help first responders in the event of calamities on Earth.

The International Space Development Conference (ISDC) connects the top leaders of current space efforts with NSS membership, students, and the public.

If there are energy fluctuations in a quantum vacuum, very interesting things can happen. For example, the E = mc² relation tells us that energy and matter are interconvertible. A vacuum energy fluctuation can be converted into particles of matter. Sounds weird? Maybe, but it happens all the time. These particles are called virtual particles, living a fleeting existence before plunging back into the ever-busy quantum vacuum.

Tryon extrapolated the idea of quantum fluctuations to the Universe as a whole. He reasoned that if all that existed was a quantum vacuum, a bubble-like energy fluctuation out of this vacuum could have given rise to the Universe. Tryon proposed that the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.