Lifeboat Foundation

Designed to one day search for evidence of life in the briny ocean beneath the icy shell of Jupiter’s moon Europa, these robots could play a key role in detecting chemical and temperature signals that might indicate alien life, according to scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who designed and tested the robots.

“People might ask, why is NASA developing an underwater robot for space exploration?” said Ethan Schaler, the project’s principal investigator at JPL. “It’s because there are places we want to go in the solar system to look for life, and we think life needs water.”

Summary: Researchers have demonstrated how brain activity can predict behavior in urban environments, providing a roadmap for improving urban planning. Using functional MRI scans, the study identified activity in the brain’s reward system, specifically the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, as a key predictor of why people visit certain urban areas.

Participants rated photos of Lisbon’s urban spaces, and their brain responses were linked to visitation patterns, showing that people are drawn to areas of perceived value. This research suggests urban design can prioritize environments that align with cognitive and emotional well-being.

Neurourbanism, the emerging field behind this study, offers tools to design cities that enhance livability and sustainability. By focusing on human-centered approaches, cities can improve efficiency, mobility, and resident happiness.

Researchers have developed a new quantum theory that for the first time defines the precise shape of a photon, showing its interaction with atoms and its environment.

This breakthrough allows for the visualization of photons and could revolutionize nanophotonic technologies, enhancing secure communication, pathogen detection, and molecular control in chemical reactions.

A groundbreaking quantum theory has allowed researchers to define the exact shape of a single photon for the first time.

A breakthrough at Rice University enhances thermophotovoltaic systems with a new thermal emitter design, achieving over 60% efficiency.

This could transform energy conversion, making it a viable alternative to batteries for grid-scale energy storage and sustainable industry practices.

Researchers at Rice University have developed an innovative way to enhance thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems, which convert heat into electricity using light. Drawing inspiration from quantum physics, engineer Gururaj Naik and his team designed a highly efficient thermal emitter that works within realistic design constraints.

The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained.

At some point in the early 1900s, cars started showing up among all the horses in Austin. It must have been a strange time, fraught with concerns about how vehicles and horses would share the streets.

Somehow, we got through it — although, occasionally, you can still spot a horse downtown.

But a new dynamic is taking shape now. While autonomous vehicles are nothing new for Austin — they’ve been tested here for nearly a decade — many people are still being caught off guard when a car with no one in it cruises by.

A team of cybersecurity researchers at Stony Brook University has uncovered a new way for scammers to steal from unsuspecting cryptocurrency users. They have posted a paper to the arXiv preprint server describing the new crypto scam and how users can protect themselves.

Cryptocurrency is a type of digital currency run on a secure online platform. One example is Coinbase. Crypto currency is stored in a crypto wallet. In this new study, the team in New York reports that scammers have found a way to get people to redirect crypto payments away from intended recipients and toward wallets held by the scammers.

The researchers call the scam typosquatting. It involves setting up Blockchain Naming Systems (BNS) domain names that are similar to those used by well-known entities. It exploits the use of simple word-based addresses rather than the complicated and hard-to-remember letter and digit codes commonly associated with crypto wallets.

People write with personal style and individual flourishes that set them apart from other writers. So does AI, including top programs like Chat GPT, new Johns Hopkins University-led research finds.

A new tool can not only detect writing created by AI, it can predict which large language model created it, findings that could help identify school cheaters and the language programs favored by people spreading online disinformation.

“We’re the first to show that AI-generated text shares the same features as human writing, and that this can be used to reliably detect it and attribute it to specific language models,” said author Nicholas Andrews, a senior research scientist at Johns Hopkins’ Human Language Technology Center of Excellence.

Observations of the cosmic microwave background, leftover light from when the Universe was only 380,000 years old, reveal that our cosmos is not rotating. Infinitely long cylinders don’t exist. The interiors of black holes throw up singularities, telling us that the math of GR is breaking down and can’t be trusted. And wormholes? They’re frighteningly unstable. A single photon passing down the throat of a wormhole will cause it to collapse faster than the speed of light. Attempts to stabilize wormholes require exotic matter (as in, matter with negative mass, which isn’t a thing), and so their existence is just as debatable as time travel itself.

This is the point where physicists get antsy. General relativity is telling us exactly where time travel into the past can be allowed. But every single example runs into other issues that have nothing to do with the math of GR. There is no consistency, no coherence among all these smackdowns. It’s just one random rule over here, and another random fact over there, none of them related to either GR or each other.

If the inability to time travel were a fundamental part of our Universe, you’d expect equally fundamental physics behind that rule. Yet every time we discover a CTC in general relativity, we find some reason it’s im possible (or at the very least, implausible), and the reason seems ad hoc. There isn’t anything tying together any of the “no time travel for you” explanations.