Lifeboat Foundation

When the Chicxulub impactor, a six-mile-wide asteroid, struck Earth 66 million years ago, the dinosaurs had no warning.

If an asteroid that size hit Earth today, a shock wave two million times more powerful than a hydrogen bomb would flatten forests and trigger tsunamis. A seismic pulse equal to a magnitude 10 earthquake would crumble cities.

And long after the impact, a cloud of hot dust, ash, and steam would blot out the sun, plunging the Earth into freezing cold.

A coalition of international law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and UK National Crime Agency, said they have disrupted LockBit, one of the most prolific hacker groups of all time, including shutting down websites the organization used for ransomware payments.

A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it’s also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It’s also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen — one that consumes the equivalent of over one sun’s mass a day.

The quasar, as bright as 500 trillion suns, has evaded astronomers for over 40 years because of its incredible luminosity.

CHICAGO, Feb 19 (Reuters) — A study that analyzed the genetic code of a quarter of a million U.S. volunteers found more than 275 million entirely new variants that may help explain why some groups are more prone to disease than others, researchers reported on Monday.

The whole genome sequencing data from a wide range of Americans aims to address the historical lack of diversity in existing genomic datasets by focusing on previously under-represented groups. The U.S. National Institutes of Health-funded “All of Us” study turned up 1 billion genetic variants in total.

“Sequencing diverse populations can lead to new drug targets that are relevant to everyone,” said Dr. Josh Denny, a study author and its chief executive. “It can also help uncover disparities that lead to specific treatments for people that are experiencing higher burdens of disease or different disease.”

Up to 97,000 Microsoft Exchange servers may be vulnerable to a critical severity privilege escalation flaw tracked as CVE-2024–21410 that hackers are actively exploiting.

Microsoft addressed the issue on February 13, when it had already been leveraged as a zero-day. Currently, 28,500 servers have been identified as being vulnerable.

Exchange Server is widely used in business environments to facilitate communication and collaboration among users, providing email, calendar, contact management, and task management services.

Inspired by the distribution of sunflower seeds, a group of scientists say they have developed a new city-pattern that ensures the best distribution of solar energy utilization “in low solar radiation countries.”

“Our new city-plan bears close resemblance to the distribution of seeds in sunflowers. This distribution ensures the best utilization of solar energy,” says Dr. Ammar A. T. Alkhalidi, University of Sharjah’s Associate Professor of Sustainable and Renewable Energy Engineering.

Dr. Alkhalidi is the lead author of a new study titled “Sunflower-inspired urban city pattern to improve solar energy utilization in low solar radiation countries.” The study is published in journal Renewable Energy Focus.

Intuitive Machines said its team programmed the lander’s wide and narrow field-of-view cameras “to take five quick images every five minutes for two hours, starting 100 seconds after separating from SpaceX’s second stage,” adding that “out of all the images collected, Intuitive Machines chose to show humanity’s place in the universe with four wonderful images we hope [will] inspire the next generation of risk-takers.”

In a mission update, Intuitive Machines said that Odysseus “continues to be in excellent health” as mission IM-1 makes its way toward the moon for a touchdown scheduled to take place on Thursday. “Flight controllers are preparing planned trajectory correction maneuvers to prepare the lander for lunar orbit insertion,” the company added in its message.

If Intuitive Machines manages to perform a successful soft landing with Odysseus, it will become the first private company to achieve the feat. It will also mark the first soft lunar landing by a U.S. spacecraft since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

The U.S. government is giving chip maker GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion in grants to build and expand facilities in New York and Vermont, the first major award in a program that aims to reinvigorate domestic chip production.

The award from the Commerce Department kicks off what is expected to be a series of cash injections into semiconductor manufacturing projects in Arizona, Texas, New York and Ohio in the coming weeks. Chip makers Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology have all submitted applications for the government to cover a portion of the billions of dollars it costs to build cutting-edge factories.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day.

The record-breaking quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. The black hole powering this distant quasar is more than 17 billion times more immense than our sun, an Australian-led team reported Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

While the quasar resembles a mere dot in images, scientists envision a ferocious place.