Lifeboat Foundation

To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence.

A small, globe-trotting balloon declared “missing in action” by an Illinois-based hobbyist club on Feb. 15 has emerged as a candidate to explain one of the three mystery objects shot down by four heat-seeking missiles launched by U.S. Air Force fighters since Feb. 10.

The club—the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB)—is not pointing fingers yet.

But the circumstantial evidence is at least intriguing. The club’s silver-coated, party-style, “pico balloon” reported its last position on Feb. 10 at 38,910 ft. off the west coast of Alaska, and a popular forecasting tool—the HYSPLIT model provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—projected the cylindrically shaped object would be floating high over the central part of the Yukon Territory on Feb. 11. That is the same day a Lockheed Martin F-22 shot down an unidentified object of a similar description and altitude in the same general area.

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Sketches found inside Leonardo da Vinci’s sketchbooks, show that he had already grasped the essence of Einstein’s 1907 ‘Equivalence Principle’ centuries before the physicist.

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We often see stories of invincible warriors with superhuman abilities combating monstrous threats, but are the days of super soldiers nearly upon us, and could they be the biggest threat of all?

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Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci demonstrated frictional forces slow down the motion of surfaces in contact. Friction, he determined, is proportional to normal force. When two objects are pressed together twice as hard, friction doubles.

“We see this principle with tectonic plate boundaries,” says Utah State University geophysicist Srisharan Shreedharan. “As surfaces slide against each other, we observe frictional properties, including frictional healing that describes the degree of fault restrengthening between earthquakes. However, we know little about how this phenomenon may affect future slip events, including earthquakes.”

He and colleagues Demian Saffer and Laura Wallace of the University of Texas at Austin, where Shreedharan was previously employed as a postdoctoral fellow, and Charles Williams of New Zealand’s GNS Science geoscience research institute, publish findings about ultralow frictional healing and slow slip events along the Hikurangi tectonic plate boundary in the Feb. 17, 2023, issue of the journal Science.

A facial approximation reveals what Zuzu, a man who lived 9,600 years ago in Brazil, may have looked like.

Physicists used MINERvA, a Fermilab neutrino experiment, to measure the proton’s size and structure using a neutrino-scattering technique.

For the first time, particle physicists have been able to precisely measure the proton’s size and structure using neutrinos. With data gathered from thousands of neutrino-hydrogen scattering events collected by MINERvA, a particle physics experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, physicists have found a new lens for exploring protons. The results were published today in the scientific journal Nature.

This measurement is also important for analyzing data from experiments that aim to measure the properties of neutrinos with great precision, including the future Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab.

The low temperatures and high ultraviolet (UV) radiation levels at the surface of Mars today currently preclude the survival of life anywhere except perhaps in limited subsurface niches.

Several ideas for making the Martian surface more habitable have been put forward previously, but they all involve massive environmental modification that will be well beyond human capability for the foreseeable future. Here we present a new approach to this problem. We show that widespread regions of the surface of Mars could be made habitable to photosynthetic life in the future via a solid-state analogue to Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse effect.

Specifically, we demonstrate via experiments and modelling that under Martian environmental conditions, a 2 to 3-cm thick layer of silica (SiO2) aerogel will simultaneously transmit sufficient visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently to above the melting point of water, without the need for any internal heat source. Placing silica aerogel shields over sufficiently ice-rich regions of the Martian surface could therefore allow photosynthetic life to survive there with minimal subsequent intervention.