Zack Miles – Lifeboat News: The Blog https://lifeboat.com/blog Safeguarding Humanity Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:24:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 Asteroid the size of 81 bulldogs to pass Earth on Wednesday https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/asteroid-the-size-of-81-bulldogs-to-pass-earth-on-wednesday Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:24:24 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/asteroid-the-size-of-81-bulldogs-to-pass-earth-on-wednesday

Asteroid 2021 JA5 is around the size of 81 bulldogs, the symbol of the college football team of the University of Georgia. But it won’t hit us – hopefully the Bulldog team will have better luck.

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How do electric batteries work, and what affects their properties? https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/how-do-electric-batteries-work-and-what-affects-their-properties Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:24:05 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/how-do-electric-batteries-work-and-what-affects-their-properties

Electric vehicles use lithium ion batteries with small amounts of nickel, manganese and cobalt. How do they work and what chemistry affects their properties?

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Bizarre ‘failed star’ the size of Jupiter is 2,000 degrees hotter than the sun https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/bizarre-failed-star-the-size-of-jupiter-is-2000-degrees-hotter-than-the-sun Tue, 05 Sep 2023 21:23:40 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/09/bizarre-failed-star-the-size-of-jupiter-is-2000-degrees-hotter-than-the-sun

This Jupiter-size object is 80 times denser than a planet and hotter than the sun.

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Do fish get thirsty? https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/do-fish-get-thirsty Thu, 22 Jun 2023 19:23:24 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/do-fish-get-thirsty

How much water a fish consumes really depends on how much salt is in its surrounding habitat. While fish do drink some water — salty or fresh, depending on their surroundings — through their mouths, they mostly absorb it through their skin and gills via osmosis.

“You’ve got to think of a fish as sort of a leaky boat in the water,” Tim Grabowski, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii, told Live Science. “You constantly have a movement of either water or the salts that are in the water between the fish’s body and the external environment.”

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World’s largest captive croc turns 120, giving scientists ‘serious knowledge on longevity’ https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/worlds-largest-captive-croc-turns-120-giving-scientists-serious-knowledge-on-longevity Wed, 21 Jun 2023 23:22:25 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/worlds-largest-captive-croc-turns-120-giving-scientists-serious-knowledge-on-longevity

“There is no way of knowing Cassius’ actual age as he was born in the wild and the age is just an estimate,” Toody Scott, a crocodile keeper who looks after Cassius at Marineland Crocodile Park on Green Island, told Live Science in an email. The nearly 18-foot-long (5.5 meters) saltwater giant’s birthday “was essentially made up a few years ago” and this time of year is actually “the wrong time of year for a crocodile to be born in northern Australia,” Scott added.

In 1984, researchers captured the crocodile on a cattle ranch southwest of Darwin, Australia, after the ranch owners complained they were losing livestock. Even then, when Cassius was estimated to be between 30 and 80 years old, he was the biggest crocodile ever caught alive in Australia.

“He was 16 feet, 10 inches [5.13 m] with at least another 6 inches [15 centimeters] of tail missing and a bit of a snout missing,” Grahame Webb, a crocodile researcher who participated in the capture, told ABC News. “He was a big old gnarly crocodile then. Crocs of that size are not normal.”

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Did Life Evolve More Than Once? Researchers Are Closing In on an Answer https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/did-life-evolve-more-than-once-researchers-are-closing-in-on-an-answer Wed, 21 Jun 2023 20:20:08 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/did-life-evolve-more-than-once-researchers-are-closing-in-on-an-answer

Eventually, these molecules probably evolved a lipid (fatty) boundary separating the internal environment of the organism from the exterior, forming protocells. Protocells could concentrate and organize better the molecules needed in biochemical reactions, providing a contained and efficient metabolism.

Life on Repeat?

Abiogenesis could have happened more than once. Earth could have birthed self-replicating molecules several times, and maybe early life for thousands or millions of years just consisted of a bunch of different self-replicating RNA molecules, with independent origins, competing for the same building blocks. Alas, due to the ancient and microscopic nature of this process, we may never know.

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IBM wants to build a 100,000-qubit quantum computer https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/ibm-wants-to-build-a-100000-qubit-quantum-computer Wed, 21 Jun 2023 19:44:17 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/ibm-wants-to-build-a-100000-qubit-quantum-computer

The company wants to make large-scale quantum computers a reality within just 10 years.

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Will Artificial Intelligence Help Us Talk to Animals? https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/will-artificial-intelligence-help-us-talk-to-animals https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/will-artificial-intelligence-help-us-talk-to-animals#comments Wed, 21 Jun 2023 19:43:58 +0000 https://lifeboat.com/blog/2023/06/will-artificial-intelligence-help-us-talk-to-animals

Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress in recent years, but can it help us talk to animals? Explore the possibilities and limitations of AI in communicating with other species.

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