Lifeboat Foundation

Philosophy of science.

We call it perception. We call it measurement. We call it analysis. But in the end it’s about how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impression of it that we have in our minds.

We might have thought that we could do science “purely objectively” without any reference to observers or their nature. But what we’ve discovered particularly dramatically in our Physics Project is that the nature of us as observers is critical even in determining the most fundamental laws we attribute to the universe.

Continue reading “Observer Theory” »

Each Monday, I pick out the northern hemisphere’s celestial highlights (mid-northern latitudes) for the week ahead.

The office is no longer just a cubicle— but it’s also not a children’s playground.

Corporate giants often hold pride in their headquarters, its design, and its acclaim among contemporaries. Chinese tech giant Tencent is set to redefine this corporate landscape with plans for its new headquarters, Tencent Helix.

Continue reading “Tencent’s futuristic new headquarters is twice the size of Apple’s” »

Move over uranium, the Milky Way’s oldest stars have bigger and better elements to make.

A group of researchers from across the United States, Canada and Sweden have discovered ancient neutron stars might have created elements with atomic mass greater than 260.

With an atomic mass of 238, uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element known on Earth, though others like plutonium have been found in trace amounts due to reactions in uranium deposits.

The asteroid that causes the Geminid shooting star swarm has also puzzled researchers with its comet-like tail. The infrared spectrum of rare meteorites helped to determine the composition of the asteroid.

Asteroid Phaethon, which is five kilometers in diameter, has been puzzling researchers for a long time. A comet-like tail is visible for a few days when the asteroid passes closest to the Sun during its orbit.

However, the tails of comets are usually formed by vaporizing ice and carbon dioxide, which cannot explain this tail. The tail should be visible already at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun.

Most space heaters run electricity through high resistance wires to toast your toes. The Heatbit mini, however, trains large language models, builds AI for large corporations, or mines crypto while it warms up your home. In so doing, it pays its owners up to $28/month while in use.

“What we really do is zero-energy computing,” says CEO Alex Busarov, who I met at Web Summit in Lisbon recently.

Bitcoin mining and AI training—which has increased one million times over the last seven years—together consume more energy than the entire United Kingdom, Busarov says. All of that goes to waste as heat, which then itself often needs to be cooled in a data or compute center, costing yet more energy.

Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. When they try to determine how habitable these planets might be, detecting water in their atmospheres plays a huge role. But what if there was another way of measuring the water content in these worlds?

Researchers are developing a way of modeling these worlds to determine how much water they have.

Habitability likely requires surface water, as far as we can tell. But detecting surface water is next to impossible. The next best thing is to use the tools we have—like the James Webb Space Telescope—to detect and characterize exoplanet atmospheres. But despite the JWST’s power, it can’t examine every exoplanet atmosphere. Some are beyond its reach. But one team of researchers is using what we do know about exoplanets, tidal heating, and radiogenic heating to try to determine which exoplanets might have oceans, either on the surface or under the surface.

NASA has been laser-beamed data from millions of miles away — and it was a message the agency sent itself.

In a press release, the NASA-funded Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech said that it has achieved “first light” laser communication via its Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment, which was launched last month on the Psyche spacecraft that’s currently making its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Continue reading “NASA Receives Laser Signal From 10 Million Miles Away” »

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has alluded to an upcoming “tap to park” feature for the automaker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta. While it isn’t clear when it’s expected to become available, some have already pointed out how useful such a feature could be.

On Friday, Musk responded to a post on X saying that Tesla is developing a feature in which the car identifies potential parking space options, letting users tap the one they want to use. Upon doing so, the driver will then be able to leave the vehicle before the vehicle parks in the selected space.

The statement came in response to another post claiming that a 360-degree bird’s eye view would be irrelevant in a world of self-driving vehicles, as the driver wouldn’t need to do anything at all for the vehicle to locate and park in a specific spot.