Lifeboat Foundation

An Antares rocket from Northrop Grumman has successfully launched the Cygnus cargo spacecraft on its way to the International Space Station. The launch happened at 9:59AM from the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport as anticipated. Assuming nothing unusual happens, NASA says the cargo vessel will arrive at the ISS on Monday, November 4, carrying a huge load of supplies and scientific materials.

One-fifth the weight of steel but five times the strength, plant-based cellulose nanofiber (CNF) offers carmakers the opportunity to build strong, lightweight cars while sustainably removing as much as 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) of carbon from the car’s life cycle.

We’ve written before about the extraordinary properties of CNFs, which were last year demonstrated to be stronger than spider silk. Made essentially from wood, but chipped, pulped and boiled in chemicals to remove lignin and hemicellulose, it’s a highly condensed, lightweight and incredibly strong material that’s also very recyclable.

It can also, as it turns out, be used in manufacturing, where it can be injection molded as a resin-reinforced slurry to form complex shapes – and the Japanese Ministry of the Environment sees it as a potential way for automakers to reduce weight and sustainably reduce their carbon footprint.

First India, now LA.

It’s taking a new approach to road construction.

Potential for small science missions … “Small satellites will play a crucial role in science and exploration, as well as providing communications and navigation infrastructure to support returning humans to the Moon,” Rocket Lab head honcho Peter Beck said. “They play a vital role as pathfinders to retire risk and lay down infrastructure for future missions. We think this could be useful for CubeSat science around the Moon or possibly communications relay capability on the cheap.” (submitted by 3ch0 and ADU)

Firefly considering AR1 engine for its Beta rocket. Firefly Aerospace has said it is collaborating with engine-maker Aerojet Rocketdyne to increase the performance of its upcoming Alpha launch vehicle, and the company is also considering Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine for a future launch vehicle, SpaceNews reports. In a statement, Firefly CEO Tom Markusic praised the AR1 as an engine well suited for Beta but stopped short of saying the engine’s selection is a done deal.

How far along is AR1 really? … Markusic: “Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR1 engine, which incorporates the latest advances in propulsion technology, materials science, and manufacturing techniques, is incredibly well-suited to power Beta given its cost-effective, high-performance capabilities.” It is not at all clear to us how close Aerojet is to completing and qualifying the AR1 engine. It also seems like Firefly should get Alpha up and running before it worries too much about the larger Beta rocket. (submitted by Unrulycow)

Read more

Laser radiation pressure is a basis of numerous applications in science and technology such as atom cooling, particle manipulation, material processing, etc. This light force for the case of scalar beams is proportional to the intensity-weighted wavevector known as optical current. The ability to design the optical current according to the considered application brings new promising perspectives to exploit the radiation pressure. However, this is a challenging problem because it often requires confinement of the optical current within tight light curves (circuits) and adapting its local value for a particular task. Here, we present a formalism to handle this problem including its experimental demonstration. It consists of a Nature-inspired circuit shaping with independent control of the optical current provided by a new kind of beam referred to as polymorphic beam. This finding is highly relevant to diverse optical technologies and can be easily extended to electron and x-ray coherent beams.

In recent years, cosmologists peering back to the very dawn of our Universe have discovered something peculiar. A whole bunch of supermassive black holes — in a time thought way too early for such massive objects to have formed.

Exactly how they got to be so freaking huge so quickly is a heck of a puzzle — but a new surprise discovery might have delivered an answer. The disc of dust and gas around a supermassive black hole is moving in such a way that it’s slurping down material faster than it would normally.

That means it’s gaining mass faster than expected — which in turn could explain what happened in the earliest days of our Universe.

The material has two major benefits for the climate.

Shneel Malik, a Barlett doctoral candidate, has created Indus — a modular wall system that is created to clean water polluted using dyes and chemicals with the help of ceramic tiles and algae. The ceramic tiles used to create this modular wall is layered with microalgae and seaweed-based hydrogel.