Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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A mission like no other.

NASA successfully launched its InSight lander Saturday, setting off its mission to Mars.

The InSight lander – short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – is set to arrive on Mars in November 2018. It was launched attached to the Atlas V rocket from the Space Launch Complex 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California before it later detached to make its way over to the Red Planet.

The successful launch also marks NASA’s first interplanetary mission to take off from the West Coast, according to the Associated Press. InSight will explore more of Mars than has ever been studied before. InSight will dig close to 16 feet into the surface of Mars to study the planet’s temperature. It will also take the first measurements of marsquakes. The Atlas V rocket also brought on two mini satellites that will follow the InSight on its mission.

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SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – A swarm of earthquakes has shaken southern El Salvador, and authorities say dozens of homes have been damaged. There are no immediate reports of serious injuries or deaths.

The U.S. Geological Survey says at least eight quakes of magnitude 4.3 or greater struck the region beginning Sunday morning. They include three of magnitude 5.2 to 5.6.

The Central American nation’s civil defense agency posted photos online of damaged roofs and rock slides.

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One of the Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is producing an artificial star — a guide star — in the skies above the Atacama desert, above the flowing Milky Way.

The Four Laser Guide Star Facility (4LGSF) shines four 22-watt laser beams into the sky to create artificial guide stars by making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow so that they look just like real stars. The artificial stars allow the adaptive optics systems to compensate for the blurring caused by the Earth’s atmosphere and so that the telescope can create sharp images.

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A scientific experiment to reanimate dead brains could lead to humans enduring a ‘fate worse than death,’ an ethics lecturer has warned.

Last month Yale University announced it had successfully resurrected the brains of more than 100 slaughtered pigs and found that the cells were still healthy.

The reanimated brains were kept alive for up to 36 hours and scientists said the process, which should also work in primates, offered a new way to study intact organs in the lab.

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This is so cute!

In today’s adorable-and-I’m-not-crying-you’re-crying news, NDTL reports that an engineer in New Delhi named Milind Raj saved a puppy using a drone he equipped with a giant claw.

Raj was out for a morning walk in New Delhi when he heard whimpering and traced the sound to a puppy that had become stuck in a boggy drain between two roads. Raj said the condition of the puppy was “miserable” and tells The Verge that local residents had heard the animal crying for two days. Others hadn’t stepped up to the task of trying to rescue the pup because “the drain was so filthy,” says Raj. “It was not possible for a human to rescue the puppy without endangering their own life.”

Raj decided to take up the task himself, and immediately set to work constructing a drone capable of rescuing the pup. Even though Raj has an extensive history in both AI and robotics, he said building the right tools was a challenging exercise. Within a few hours, he had strapped a robotic arm with a claw of sorts to a six-rotor drone, both custom-made in his lab, located in the city of Lucknow. While he had built the drone itself two years ago, the arm he equipped it with was something he specifically created for this rescue, installing sensors to track heartbeat and breathing patterns to keep tabs on the wellness of the puppy. “The AI helped me monitor the animal’s heart rate,” he said. “If the grip was too tight, the pup would suffocate.”

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