Lifeboat Foundation

The biggest Internet service providers and their trade groups spent $234.7 million on lobbying and political donations during the most recent two-year congressional cycle, according to a report released yesterday. The ISPs and their trade groups lobbied against strict net neutrality rules and on various other telecom and broadband regulatory legislation, said the report written by advocacy group Common Cause.

Of the $234.7 million spent in 2019 and 2020, political contributions and expenditures accounted for $45.6 million. The rest of it went to lobbying expenditures.

Comcast led the way with $43 million in lobbying and political contributions and expenditures combined during the 2019–2020 cycle, the report said. The highest-spending ISPs after Comcast were AT&T with $36.4 million, Verizon with $24.8 million, Charter with $24.4 million, and T-Mobile with $21.5 million. “The dollar amounts are shocking,” the report said. “In total, these corporations spent more than $234 million on lobbying and federal elections during the 116th Congress—an average of more than $320,000 a day, seven days a week!”

Continue reading “ISPs spent $235 million on lobbying and donations, ‘more than $320,000 a day’” »

The latest image from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope reveals a distant galaxy that is full of freshly created and highly energetic stars.

ESO has just released a new image of a distant galaxy full of baby stars.

Continue reading “This stunning image shows a ‘golden swirl’ of newly born stars in a distant galaxy” »

Circa 2010 face_with_colon_three

http://www.ted.com Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, talks about his quest to make all knowledge computational — able to be searched, processed and manipulated. His new search engine, Wolfram Alpha, has no lesser goal than to model and explain the physics underlying the universe.

Continue reading “Computing a theory of everything | Stephen Wolfram” »

A potentially better way to make oxygen for astronauts in space using magnetism has been proposed by an international team of scientists, including a University of Warwick chemist.

The conclusion is from new research on magnetic phase separation in microgravity published in npj Microgravity by researchers from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, University of Colorado Boulder and Freie Universität Berlin in Germany.

Keeping astronauts breathing aboard the International Space Station and other space vehicles is a complicated and costly process. As humans plan future missions to the Moon or Mars better technology will be needed.

This is the first definitive proof that the Moon inherited indigenous noble gases from the Earth’s mantle.

The Moon has long been a source of fascination for humans. The discovery is an essential piece of the puzzle in understanding how the Moon was formed. ‘Tom Dooley’ is the only instrument in the world capable of detecting such low helium and neon concentrations. A new study has found that Moon inherited the indigenous noble gases of helium and neon from Earth’s mantle.

Researchers from Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, discovered the first definitive proof that the Moon inherited indigenous noble gases from the Earth’s mantle, according to a study published in the journal Science Advances on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Scientists find ‘exciting’ links of Moon’s origin to Earth’s mantle” »

One of the most beautiful and spectacular parts of the night sky is the Orion constellation.

Herbig-Haro object HH 505 is around 1,000 light-years from the Earth. HH objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars. The photograph was created with 520 ACS images in five different colors to get the sharpest view ever. The Hubble telescope has taken a new magical image of the Orion Nebula.

One of the most beautiful and spectacular parts of the night sky is the Orion constellation. The Orion Nebula is one of the Milky Way’s most studied and photographed objects and a nest of material where young stars are being formed. Alnitak, Saif, and Rigel are floating in a large, dense cloud of interstellar dust and gas between the stars.

Continue reading “Hubble Space Telescope captures stunning close-up of Orion Nebula” »

Functioning in curved space, the robot heralds new space locomotive technology possibilities without the use of propellants.

A robot engineered at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) has done the unthinkable and flouted a steadfast law of motion, suggesting that new laws need to be defined. Such new principles may have applications in new forms of locomotion without propellants.

We’ve all seen the hilarious slapstick gag where the unwitting individual steps on a banana peel, landing comically on their rump. It may not seem like it, but the quip relies on the fact that human locomotion, like all locomotion, is based on Newton’s third law of motion.

Continue reading “Curved space robot defies known laws of physics” »

The Pilbara Craton in Western Australia is the backdrop for a new hypothesis explaining how our continents started moving.

Early Earth faced bombardments from Solar System debris. A new theory says these deep impactors set the mantle and continents in motion.

The quadrupedal robots are well suited for repetitive tasks.

Mankind’s new best friend is coming to the U.S. Space Force.

The Space Force has conducted a demonstration using dog-like quadruped unmanned ground vehicles (Q-UGVs) for security patrols and other repetitive tasks. The demonstration used at least two Vision 60 Q-UGVs, or “robot dogs,” built by Ghost Robotics and took place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on July 27 and 28.