Lifeboat Foundation

The Astronomy, Technology, and Space Science News Podcast.
SpaceTime Series 24 Episode 91
*Astronomers zero in on source of the impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
A new study claims the impactor believed to have wiped out and 75 percent of all life on Earth 66 million years ago including all the non-avian dinosaurs — likely came from the outer half of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
*Producing matter out of pure energy.
Scientists have directly converted pure light energy into matter in a single process for the first time.
The findings reported in the journal Physical Review Letters involved the creation of Electrons and their antimatter counter parts positrons — by colliding quantum packets of photons – light particles.
*Discovery of a galactic stream of galaxy clusters.
Astronomers have discovered a never-before-seen galaxy cluster with a black hole at its centre, travelling at high speed along an intergalactic road of matter.
*Solar Orbiter and BepiColombo making space history with double flyby of Venus.
As we go to air tonight the European Space Agency is making space history with two of its space craft6 undertaking almost simultaneous flybys of the planet Venus.
*The Science Report.
New US congressional report says COVID-19 leaked out of Chinese Government Wuhan Lab.
Wearing masks and social distancing even when vaccinated key to combat new COVID strains.
Rising sea levels may mean fewer eruptions from volcanic islands.
How slowing of the planet’s rotation could have paved the way for life on Earth.
Skeptic’s guide to low vaccination and low IQ.
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And ArsTechnica seems to be totally missing the point as “delaying” Starship for SOUND AND PRACTICAL SAFETY AND ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS is not ‘delaying’ progress and one needs to simply ask why SpaceX “engineers” can’t up their game enough to actually answer or address those legitimate questions? The answer is rather simple, they probably CAN but the person “in charge” has no with to, incentive to, or will to do so because he sees anyone that questions him as ‘unreasonable opposition’ rather than legitimate concern. Starship could crash and burn on the orbital flight and it would not make a difference at all to the ‘world’ in general. We can and have recovered from worse numerous times while advancing technology and transportation. The FACT that Musk, (and his many rapid fans) somehow “assume” that he and only he can ‘advance’ space access are very much proof that this is not about engineering, ability or purpose but strictly about ego.

To the FAA, Musk seemed to be saying, federal regulators must do their part to ensure the future arrives on schedule. Just as the 20th-century skyscrapers marked the beginning of a new era and eventually launched America into a prosperous future of finance, communication, marketing, and more, the 21st century now beckons.

The skyscraper age will soon give way to the space age.

Continue reading “With a single photo, SpaceX sent a not-so-subtle message to FAA regulators” »

AIR PLASMA BREATHING via Ground Stations, in lieu of on-board energy supply: Recently, both a German team and a Chinese team have demonstrated jet engines capable of as much thrust as a traditional jet engine, but powered only by electricity. In both cases, the engine uses large amounts of energy to turn ambient atmosphere into plasma, then jetison it via magnetic nozzles. This is to be differentiated from space ion drives, which use tiny amounts of fuel, ejected at high velocities to slowly accellerate a vehicle in free space. By contrast, this new type of engine has huge amounts of fuel available to it in the form of the ambient atmosphere. Such craft could operate in any planetary atmosphere in our solar system, whether on Venus, Earth, Mars, the gas giant or ice giant planets. The only bottleneck holding this type of engine from replacing all current airplanes is the lack of a sufficiently dense on-board energy source. The most obvious enabling technology which will allow this new type of jet, which will require no fuel for its entire lifetime—since its fuel will be the atmosphere—is fusion energy. Fusion is dense enough to fit into a small package, easily mounted on an airplane. Until fusion is obtained there is one other possibility which is currently available, which is beaming energy to a flying vehicle from ground stations. An air-plasma-breathing vehicle, whether a self-standing airplane, or a partial booster phase for a rocket to low-earth-orbit, would have to follow a trajectory within direct line-of-sight of a series of ground beaming stations. A string of such stations would be akin to a land highway, a corridior within which air traffic or space-bound vehicles could travel. Such a corridior would be easy to create. Even over ocean, aircraft carriers or other nuclear vessels could transmit large amounts of energy to such vehicles. For rockets travelling to orbit, such a system would reduce reaction mass, since a portion of its fuel would not be carried by the vehicle. File: compilation of papers on beamed energy for flying vehicles:

Beam-powered propulsion, also known as directed energy propulsion, is a class of aircraft or spacecraft propulsion that uses energy beamed to the spacecraft from a remote power plant to provide energy. The beam is typically either a microwave or a laser beam and it is either pulsed or continuous. A continuous beam lends itself to thermal rockets, photonic thrusters and light sails, whereas a pulsed beam lends itself to ablative thrusters and pulse detonation engines.

The rule of thumb that is usually quoted is that it takes a megawatt of power beamed to a vehicle per kg of payload while it is being accelerated to permit it to reach low earth orbit.

Continue reading “Beamed Energy Propulsion / Beamed Laser Energy Propulsion Documents” »

Natural language processing continues to find its way into unexpected corners. This time, it’s phishing emails. In a small study, researchers found that they could use the deep learning language model GPT-3, along with other AI-as-a-service platforms, to significantly lower the barrier to entry for crafting spearphishing campaigns at a massive scale.

Researchers have long debated whether it would be worth the effort for scammers to train machine learning algorithms that could then generate compelling phishing messages. Mass phishing messages are simple and formulaic, after all, and are already highly effective. Highly targeted and tailored “spearphishing” messages are more labor intensive to compose, though. That’s where NLP may come in surprisingly handy.

At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas this week, a team from Singapore’s Government Technology Agency presented a recent experiment in which they sent targeted phishing emails they crafted themselves and others generated by an AI-as-a-service platform to 200 of their colleagues. Both messages contained links that were not actually malicious but simply reported back clickthrough rates to the researchers. They were surprised to find that more people clicked the links in the AI-generated messages than the human-written ones—by a significant margin.

Accelerating norway towards a low-carbon economy — bjørn kjærand haugland, co-founder and CEO, skift.

Bjørn Haugland is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of SKIFT Business Climate Leaders (https://www.skiftnorge.no/english), a Norwegian business-led climate initiative with a mission to accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy and support the government in delivering on its national climate commitments by 2030. The coalition hopes to demonstrate, to businesses and the government, the business potential that exists in the low-carbon economy and help drive the transition.

Continue reading “Bjørn Haugland — Co-Founder and CEO — SKIFT Business Climate Leaders” »

Private sector solutions to major social problems — stephanie smith — director, humanitarian & development, mastercard.

Stephanie Smith is a Director, in the Humanitarian & Development group, at Mastercard (https://www.mastercard.us), the American multinational financial services corporation.

Continue reading “Stephanie Smith — Director, Humanitarian & Development, Mastercard” »

Los Alamos National Laboratory has identified 45 barrels of radioactive waste so potentially explosive — due to being mixed with incompatible chemicals — that crews have been told not to move them and instead block off the area around the containers, according to a government watchdog’s report.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory has identified 45 barrels of radioactive waste so potentially explosive — due to being mixed with incompatible chemicals — that crews have been told not to move them and instead block off the area around the containers, according to a government watchdog’s report.

The safety board estimated an exploding waste canister could expose workers to 760 rem, far beyond the threshold of a lethal dose. A rem is a unit used to measure radiation exposure. In i ts latest weekly report, the safety board said crews at Newport News Nuclear BWXT Los Alamos, also known as N3B — the contractor in charge of cleaning up the lab’s legacy waste — have pegged 60 barrels with volatile mixtures and have relocated 15 drums to the domed area.

Forty-five barrels are deemed too dangerous to move, raising questions of what ultimately can be done with them and how hazardous it would be to keep them in their current spot.

Continue reading “Report: Some Los Alamos nuclear waste too hazardous to move” »

The US military’s AI experiments are growing particularly ambitious. The Drive reports that US Northern Command recently completed a string of tests for Global Information Dominance Experiments (GIDE), a combination of AI, cloud computing and sensors that could give the Pentagon the ability to predict events “days in advance,” according to Command leader General Glen VanHerck. It’s not as mystical as it sounds, but it could lead to a major change in military and government operations.

The machine learning-based system observes changes in raw, real-time data that hint at possible trouble. If satellite imagery shows signs that a rival nation’s submarine is preparing to leave port, for instance, the AI could flag that mobilization knowing the vessel will likely leave soon. Military analysts can take hours or even days to comb through this information — GIDE technology could send an alert within “seconds,” VanHerck said.

The most recent dry run, GIDE 3, was the most expansive yet. It saw all 11 US commands and the broader Defense Department use a mix of military and civilian sensors to address scenarios where “contested logistics” (such as communications in the Panama Canal) might pose a problem. The technology involved wasn’t strictly new, the General said, but the military “stitched everything together.”