Lifeboat Foundation

Here’s a bit of science history that genuinely surprised many of us here at Ars Technica. We all know the famous story of how Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967 as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge—and the longstanding debate about whether she should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to her supervisor, Antony Hewish. But apparently, an Air Force staff sergeant manning an early warning radar station in Alaska arguably beat Bell-Burnell to the punch. He just couldn’t come forward until 2007, after the instrument had been decommissioned. Nature reported the story at the time, but we most definitely missed it—and we probably weren’t the only ones.

Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron stars that create pulsed emissions as their magnetic fields sweep across the line of sight with Earth. As previously reported, whenever a massive star runs out of fuel, it explodes into a supernova. If it’s above a certain threshold in mass, it becomes a black hole. Below that threshold, it becomes an ultra-dense neutron star. Pulsars are unusual in that they spin rapidly and have very powerful magnetic fields, so they emit very high-energy beams of light. The star’s rotation makes it seem like those beams are flashing on and off like a cosmic lighthouse.

Bell-Burnell was monitoring the new radio telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, sifting through reams and reams of paper records to hunt for any unusual anomalies in the peaks of data representing incoming galactic radio waves. Three weeks in, on August 6, she spotted a faint signal coming from a particular area of the sky that disappeared, then reappeared, in 1.34-second intervals. The team quickly ruled out any known natural sources or other kinds of interference. She and Hewish even joked that it might be a signal from an alien civilization, dubbing the object “LGM-1” for “Little Green Men.”

A new space weather sensor is heading to the International Space Station to help scientists understand how the sun’s outbursts alter Earth’s upper atmosphere.

The sensor’s data will help space weather forecasters predict how sudden eruptions of radiation and plasma from the star at the center of our solar system disrupt satellite communication links and affect signals from navigational satellites such as Europe’s Galileo.

Articles about the future.

Physical interpretations of the time-symmetric formulation of quantum mechanics, due to Aharonov, Bergmann, and Lebowitz are discussed in terms of weak values. The most direct, yet somewhat naive, interpretation uses the time-symmetric formulation to assign eigenvalues to unmeasured observables of a system, which results in logical paradoxes, and no clear physical picture. A top–down ontological model is introduced that treats the weak values of observables as physically real during the time between pre-and post-selection (PPS), which avoids these paradoxes. The generally delocalized rank-1 projectors of a quantum system describe its fundamental ontological elements, and the highest-rank projectors corresponding to individual localized objects describe an emergent particle model, with unusual particles, whose masses and energies may be negative or imaginary. This retrocausal top–down model leads to an intuitive particle-based ontological picture, wherein weak measurements directly probe the properties of these exotic particles, which exist whether or not they are actually measured.

DNA produces a metamaterial stronger and lighter than steel. Desiccants reduce HVAC system energy use. And fungi is turned into concrete.

There are an estimated 30,000 instances of arc flash each year in the United States alone, and one to two fatalities occur daily in North America. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has five Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots deployed throughout their Enterprise Innovation division. In 2022, the team sought to see if Spot’s dexterous arm could be used to assist in tripping and racking out a 600 volt breaker—an activity that is high risk for arc flash. Now, Boston Dynamics engineers have taken this application to the next level by fully automating the procedure. Spot can perform the entire operation autonomously, with a human issuing high level commands safely out of harm’s way.

#PowerGeneration #bostondynamics #Robotics #spot

Even with the quantum rules governing the Universe, there are limits to what matter can withstand. Beyond that, black holes are unavoidable.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to determine that a nearby exoplanet is losing its atmosphere due to interactions with its star.

Webb is casting the universe in a new light, but the space telescope’s discovery of a cosmological question mark has us scratching our heads.