Lifeboat Foundation

It’s easy to miss the mirror forge at the University of Arizona. While sizable, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory sits in the shadow of the university’s much larger 56,000-seat football stadium. Even its most distinctive feature—an octagonal concrete prominence emblazoned with the school’s logo—looks like an architectural feature for the arena next door. But it’s that tower that houses some of the facility’s most critical equipment.

Inside the lab, a narrow, fluorescent-green staircase spirals up five floors to the tower’s entrance. I’m a few steps from the top when lab manager Stuart Weinberger asks, for the third time, whether I have removed everything from my pockets.

“Glasses, keys, pens. Anything that could fall and damage the mirror,” he says. Weinberger has agreed to escort me to the top of the tower and onto a catwalk some 80 feet above a mirror 27.5 feet in diameter. A mirror that has already taken nearly six years—and $20 million—to make. “Most people in the lab aren’t even allowed up here,” he says. That explains Weinberger’s nervousness about the contents of my pockets (which are really, truly empty), and why he has tethered my camera to my wrist with a short line of paracord.

Continue reading “The Astounding Engineering Behind the Giant Magellan Telescope” »

Scientist have just discovered that, at an atomic level, these elements have both liquid and solid states, giving context to what may be hidden in the cores of celestial bodies.

A New State of Water Reveals a Hidden Ocean in Earth’s Mantle — https://youtu.be/pgm4z8vJVVk

Continue reading “This New State of Matter Is a Liquid and a Solid at the Same Time!” »

Humans may not be able to burp properly in space, but we can now edit a genome. For the first time, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of brewer’s yeast.

The goal wasn’t to create super space yeast. The astronauts were studying how DNA repair mechanisms work in space, so they snipped through strands of the fungus’s genetic code in a number of places to mimic radiation damage.

“The damage actually happens on the space station and the analysis also happens in space,” said Emily Gleason of miniPCR Bio, the company that designed the DNA lab aboard the ISS. “We want to understand if DNA repair methods are different in space than on Earth.”

Continue reading “For The First Time, DNA Has Been Edited With CRISPR in Space” »

Relational quantum mechanics suggests physics might be a science of perceptions, not observer-independent reality.

• By Bernardo Kastrup on May 24, 2019

Get your telescope ready for Saturday night.

Using ground-penetrating radar, scientists detected a massive reservoir of frozen water sandwiched by layers of sand beneath the northern polar ice cap on Mars. This reservoir contains so much ice that, if melted and brought to the surface, it would submerge the entire planet.

“This was a surprise even for us,” Stefano Nerozzi, the lead author of the new paper and a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin, told Gizmodo in an email.

A USC team won the collegiate space race by sending a rocket above the Kármán line, the imaginary boundary that marks the end of Earth’s atmosphere.

I agree with Bezos on this one.

Elon Musk dismissed Jeff Bezos’ plan of housing a trillion people in orbiting ‘O’Neill colonies,’ which resemble gargantuan spinning cylinders.

Researchers believe they’ve spotted the remains of ancient Martian ice caps mingled with layers of sand, all a mile below the Red Planet’s modern north pole.