Lifeboat Foundation

In a few years, powerful new telescopes will usher in a search for habitable worlds outside our solar system. And TRAPPIST-1—a dim, tepid star just a smidge larger than Jupiter—is one of the first places we’ll look. It’s only forty light years away, and it’s home to several promising, Earth-sized exoplanets.

Three siblings, described today in the journal Nature, are the first exoplanets ever discovered around an “ultracool dwarf” star. And they’re a jackpot when it comes to the search for alien life. Each planet is similar in size to Earth or Venus and probably rocky. The planets all skirt the edge of the so-called habitable zone. Finally, these potential Earth twins are so close to us that we can begin studying their atmospheres right now.

“This is basically a paradigm shift,” study co-author Julien de Wit told Gizmodo. “If these planets have atmospheres, they really are the best places to look for life.”

Continue reading “This Tiny Star Is Now the Best Place to Hunt for Alien Life” »

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have used chemicals to transform skin cells into heart cells and brain cells, instead of adding external genes — making this accomplishment a breakthrough, according to the scientists.

Continue reading “Scientists turn skin cells into heart and brain cells using only drugs — no stem cells required” »

In less than two minutes, Tesla employees were able to take off their gas masks.

In.
1979, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a novel about an elevator to space. This.
is the story of the people who intend to build it.

Continue reading “About Sky Line” »

Interesting insight on Aluminum Nitride used to create Qubits.

http:///articles/could-aluminum-nitride-be-engineered-to-pro…nteresting insight.

Newswise — Quantum computers have the potential to break common cryptography techniques, search huge datasets and simulate quantum systems in a fraction of the time it would take today’s computers. But before this can happen, engineers need to be able to harness the properties of quantum bits or qubits.

Continue reading “Could Aluminum Nitride Be Engineered to Produce Quantum Bits?” »

Seed bombing is a method for repairing deforested land.

And that means dropping *a lot* of seeds from the sky.

Interesting…

LIGO experiment could have detected signal from ‘exotic’ compact celestial object.

A new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets, plus a revised Drake’s equation, produces a new, empirically valid probability of whether any other advanced civilizations have ever existed.