Lifeboat Foundation

In the years since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system—more than 4,000 have been observed. Usually, their presence is given away by the slight effects they have on their parent stars, which vastly outshine them. For a decade and half, scientists have been trying to image exoplanets directly, but the Earth’s atmosphere presents a major impediment when they attempt to leverage large ground-based telescopes.

Now, a team of U.S. and Japanese scientists and engineers that includes researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new exoplanet-hunting camera. Deployed at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawai’I, the device is the world’s largest superconducting camera by pixel count and will pave the way for direct imaging of extra-solar planets in the near future. An instrument paper appearing in Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific announced the new device to the astronomical community.

Constructed by researchers in the lab of Professor Ben Mazin, the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC) uses Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) to enable scientists to directly image exoplanets and disks around bright stars. The detector runs at a brisk 90 millikelvin—just a touch over absolute zero—and is the first permanently deployed superconducting camera that operates in the optical and near infrared spectrum.

Praying mantises are well known for being skilled, formidable, and successful hunters. Now a new species discovered in Peru has added another intriguing weapon to their arsenal – impaling their prey on specially adapted barbs on their legs. According to researchers, this is a novel hunting strategy not seen before in mantids, or in fact any insect, and they hadn’t even been looking for it.

Dr Julio Rivera, an entomologist at Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola in Lima, first came across a male specimen of the mantis in 2000 when a colleague captured it in the Tingo María tropical rainforest region of Peru, and brought it to the lab. In the following years, more specimens turned up and were added to the collection at the University, and not long after Rivera returned to Peru in 2017, a local student donated three living juveniles – enough for Rivera to attempt a proper taxonomic description.

Physical features suggested the mantis was likely a new species, so the goal of rearing juveniles was to get them to maturity to study their genitals. “[E]ach species has a distinct genital shape, which helps to define the species,” Dr Rivera told IFLScience.

Watch a strange, sprouting mushroom reach out like an octopus … or the devil’s fingers.
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Conventional water electrolysis for the production of hydrogen faces technological challenges to improve the efficiency of the water-splitting reaction for the sluggish oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Noble metal-based ruthenium oxide (RuO₂) and iridium oxide (IrO₂) are used to enhance the oxygen generation rate. However, these noble metal catalysts are very expensive and show poor stability under long-term operation.

Amazing how much our world has changed since 1984 😱

Google Earth + UNILAD Adventure

Professor of theoretical epidemiology Sunetra Gupta has criticised the planned return to a Covid tier system in December.

Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the Great Barrington Declaration co-author said it “still leaves the doors open to the enormous harms of lockdown”.

Continue reading “Professor Sunetra Gupta: ‘Lockdowns are a luxury of the affluent…the UK cannot afford it’” »

‘Sound beaming’ 3D technology from Noveto Systems tracks ear and sends it audio using ultrasonic waves, creating personal listening pockets.

Your hand will give up before this pen does.

Six years after our initial report, Lesley Stahl visits surviving members of the 90+ Study and finds out what scientists have learned from following the study’s participants.