Lifeboat Foundation

Start using AnyDesk, the blazing-fast Remote Desktop Software, today at https://anydesk.com/en/downloads/windows?utm_source=brand&am…tm_term=en.

Written by Joseph Conlon.
Professor of Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford.
Author, Why String Theory? https://www.amazon.com/Why-String-Theory-Joseph-Conlon/dp/14…atfound-20
Edited and Narrated by David Kelly.
Thumbnail Art by Ettore Mazza.
Animations by Jero Squartini https://fiverr.com/freelancers/jerosq.
Huge thanks to Jeff Bryant for his Calabi-yau animation.

Continue reading “Have We Really Found The Theory Of Everything?” »

Sometimes to know what the matter is, you have to find it first. When the universe began, matter was flung outward and gradually formed the planets, stars and galaxies that we know and love today. By carefully assembling a map of that matter today, scientists can try to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe.

A group of scientists, including several with the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today.

Combining data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, the analysis involved more than 150 researchers and is published as a set of three articles Jan. 31 in Physical Review D.

The internet is abuzz with mentions of Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) a.k.a., the green comet, which on Wednesday could be seen with the naked eye.

As per NASA, the comet paid our planet a visit after a good 50,000 years. It was a rare feast for stargazers and astronomers alike as people around the globe witnessed the astronomical event.

With simulations that go into finer details than ever before, Brooke Polak of the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) have modeled a key phase in the formation of planets in our solar system: the way that centimeter-size pebbles aggregate into so-called planetesimals tens to hundreds kilometers in size. The simulation reproduces the initial size distribution of planetesimals, which can be checked against observations of present-day asteroids. It also predicts the prevalence of close binary planetesimals in our solar system.

In a new study published on arXiv and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, astrophysicists Brooke Polak from the University of Heidelberg and Hubert Klahr from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy used simulations to derive key properties of so-called planetesimals—the intermediate-size bodies from which planets formed in our solar system roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

Using an innovative method for simulating planetesimal formation, the two researchers were able to predict the initial size distribution of planetesimals in our solar system: how many are likely to have formed in the different “size brackets” between roughly 10 km and 200 km.

An international team of space scientists reports that the moon exerts a tidal impact on the plasmasphere. For their paper published in the journal Nature Physics, the group used data from multiple spacecraft over a nearly 40-year period to measure tidal perturbations in the plasmapause. Balázs Heilig, with the Institute of Earth Physics and Space Science, in Hungary, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue, explaining the nature of the plasmasphere and outlining the work in this new effort.

Early scientists found a connection between the tides and the movement of the moon thousands of years ago. More recent evidence suggests the moon’s pull acts on the ionosphere as well. In this new study, the researchers wondered if the moon might also have an impact on the plasmasphere.

The plasmasphere is a toroidal mass of plasma that surrounds the Earth. It lies beyond the ionosphere and is made up mostly of electrons and protons. Its particles are charged by the ionosphere, and its outer boundary is known as the plasmapause.

On Jan. 16, 2003 space shuttle Columbia left Earth for its 28th and last flight. Even though at the time building the International Space Station was the main goal of the shuttle program, STS-107 (Columbia’s final mission) emphasized pure research, according to Space.com.

The seven-member crew — Rick Husband, commander; Michael Anderson, payload commander; David Brown, mission specialist; Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist; Laurel Clark, mission specialist; William McCool, pilot; and Ilan Ramon, payload specialist from the Israeli Space Agency — had spent 24 hours a day doing science experiments in two shifts.

The seven astronauts on board Columbia were killed on Feb. 1, 2003 when the space shuttle broke up while it was returning to Earth.

JWST is good at spotting very faint, very distant objects like ancient galaxies, because it views the universe in infrared light, whose wavelengths are slightly longer than the ones our unaided eyes can see. Light from distant objects, which are moving even farther away from us as the universe expands, gets stretched into those longer wavelengths.

Although this is the most recent image the JWST team has processed and released to the public, it was one of the first images the telescope actually took. During the early summer of 2022, astronomers and engineers were firing up Webb’s instruments and getting them ready to do real science observations. This stunning image of spiral galaxy LEDA 2,046,648 was part of the process of commissioning JWST’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (which was recently out of order for two weeks thanks to a run-in with a cosmic ray).

Join the ORE community to learn about computational redstone like this at:

Continue reading “I made a 32bit Computer in Minecraft and ran Tetris on it!” »

‘Spin’ is a fundamental quality of fundamental particles like the electron, invoking images of a tiny sphere revolving rapidly on its axis like a planet in a shrunken solar system.

Only it isn’t. It can’t. For one thing, electrons aren’t spheres of matter but points described by the mathematics of probability.

But California Institute of Technology philosopher of physics Charles T. Sebens argues such a particle-based approach to one of the most accurate theories in physics might be misleading us.