Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX rockets are tearing holes in the Earth’s atmosphere as they make their return to the surface, triggering what scientists are calling “SpaceX auroras,” a newly coined term that refers to red, spherical spots in the night sky that can easily be seen with the naked eye.

As Spaceweather.com reports, the name isn’t entirely accurate as they’re technically not auroras. They’re the result of SpaceX rockets burning their engines in the Earth’s ionosphere, a part of the upper atmosphere where solar radiation ionizes atoms and molecules to create a protective layer of electrons.

That means that as the rocketmaker ratchets up its launch schedule, that could be a problem, because the ionosphere serves an important technical function by ensuring the stability of shortwave radio communication and GPS signals.

Behind every successful scientist, there is another scientist.

SpaceX is making progress at Starbase, collaborating with the US Transportation Command and Air Force, potentially becoming a major source of revenue, while also facing potential competition from Relativity Space, and experiencing design errors but still managing to save samples.

Questions to inspire discussion.

Continue reading “SpaceX Military Starship: Progress, Collaboration, Revenue, Competition, and Design Errors” »

Tesla has unveiled “Optimus Gen 2”, a new generation of its humanoid robot that should be able to take over repetitive tasks from humans.

Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, has not been taken seriously by many outside of the more hardcore Tesla fans, and for good reason.

When it was first announced, it seemed to be a half-baked idea from CEO Elon Musk with a dancer disguised as a robot for visual aid. It also didn’t help that the demo at Tesla AI Day last year was less than impressive.

People may be more than two times likelier to develop schizophrenia-related disorders if they owned cats during childhood than if they didn’t:

Living with cats as a child has once again been linked to mental health disorders, because our furry friends apparently can’t catch a break.

In a new meta-analysis published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, Australian researchers identified 17 studies between 1980 and 2023 that seemed to associate cat ownership in childhood with schizophrenia-related disorders — a sample size narrowed down from a whopping 1,915 studies that dealt with cats during that 43-year time period.

Continue reading “Childhood Cat Exposure Once Again Linked to Schizophrenia” »

Researchers have come one step closer to answering why, in some patients, a type of lymphoma changes from indolent to aggressive, and in particular, they are closer to identifying which patients are at high risk of this change happening.

Part of the answer lies in the protein expression in the tumor, explains Associate Professor Maja Ludvigsen from the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. Maja is one of the authors of a new study on the subject, which has just been published in the journal Blood Advances.

Follicular lymphoma is an incurable lymphoma. But unlike many other cancers, it is not always aggressive from the start. This means that patients with the disease have to live with the uncertainty of when—and how—the cancer will develop. It also means frequent visits to the hospital to monitor any acute developments.

The ATLAS collaboration recently measured the strength of the strong force to a record level of precision, but there’s still long way to go toward understanding this fundamental force.

Stout has earned a spot on the Top500 computers list that was released Nov. 13.

Self-propelled nanoparticles could potentially advance drug delivery and lab-on-a-chip systems — but they are prone to go rogue with random, directionless movements. Now, an international team of researchers has developed an approach to rein in the synthetic particles.

Led by Igor Aronson, the Dorothy Foehr Huck and J. Lloyd Huck Chair Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Mathematics at Penn State, the team redesigned the nanoparticles into a propeller shape to better control their movements and increase their functionality. They published their results in the journal Small (“Multifunctional Chiral Chemically-Powered Micropropellers for Cargo Transport and Manipulation”).

A propeller-shaped nanoparticle spins counterclockwise, triggered by a chemical reaction with hydrogen peroxide, followed by an upward movement, triggered by a magnetic field. The optimized shape of these particles allows researchers to better control the nanoparticles’ movements and to pick up and move cargo particles. (Video: Active Biomaterials Lab)