Lifeboat Foundation

The blue hue of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is seen inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland during recent thruster qualification testing. This 12-kilowatt Hall thruster is the most powerful electric propulsion thruster in production, and it will be critical to future science and exploration missions at the Moon and beyond.

The blue plume is a steady stream of ionized xenon gas ejected to produce low, highly efficient thrust. These electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds over time using only a fraction of the fuel chemical propulsion systems require, making electric propulsion an excellent choice for deep-space exploration and science missions.

Three AEPS thrusters will be mounted on the Power and Propulsion Element, a foundational component of Gateway. The small lunar space station is critical to the agency’s Artemis missions that will help prepare for human missions to Mars. The Power and Propulsion Element will provide Gateway with power, high-rate communications, and allow it to maintain its unique orbit around the Moon.

As part of its announcement at the Aspen Cyber Summit in New York City today, Google also said that in 2024 it will give 100,000 of the new Titan keys to high-risk individuals around the world. The effort is part of Google’s Advanced Protection Program, which offers vulnerable users expanded account monitoring and threat protection. The company has given away Titan keys through the program in the past, and today it cited the rise of phishing attacks and upcoming global elections as two examples of the need to continue expanding the use of secure authentication methods like passkeys.

Hardware authentication tokens have unique protective benefits because they are siloed, stand-alone devices. But they still need to be rigorously secured to ensure they don’t introduce a different point of weakness. And as with any product, they can have vulnerabilities. In 2019, for example, Google recalled and replaced its Titan BLE-branded security key because of a flaw in its Bluetooth implementation.

When it comes to the new Titan generation, Google tells WIRED that, as with all of its products, it conducted an extensive internal security review on the devices and it also contracted with two external auditors, NCC Group and Ninja Labs, to conduct independent assessments of the new key.

The discovery could open the door to new treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes.

In a breakthrough at CERN

Established in 1954 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, CERN is a European research organization that operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Its full name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire) and the CERN acronym comes from the French Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire. CERN’s main mission is to study the fundamental structure of the universe through the use of advanced particle accelerators and detectors.

Multimaterial 3D-printing approach produces functional devices in a single shot.

The European Space Agency is slated to launch a satellite in 2030 that’s meant to probe the nature of dark matter.

A journey of a billion miles and back begins with a launch.

OSIRIS-REx’s goal: Travel to asteroid Bennu, collect a sample, and return it home. But why Bennu? Meet the NASA Explorers looking for clues to our early solar system in a sample of asteroid rock.

Continue reading “NASA Explorers Season 6, Episode 1: Launch” »

Cutting 1 teaspoon of salt from your diet each day can lower your top blood pressure reading just as much as a typical hypertension medication, even if you don’t have high blood pressure, a new study found.

A teaspoon of salt is 2,300 milligrams — that’s the top daily limit for people over 14 recommended by the latest U.S. nutritional guidelines. However, the American Heart Association recommends a diet with less than 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day.

Swooping magnetic fields that confine plasma in doughnut-shaped fusion facilities known as tokamaks could help improve the efficiency of complex machines that produce microchips. This innovation could lead to more powerful computers and smart phones, near-essential devices that make modern society possible.

Engineers use high-energy light emitted by plasma, the electrically charged fourth state of matter, to create small structures on the surfaces of silicon wafers during their transformation into microchips. These tiny components enable a range of devices, including consumer electronics, video games, medical machinery, and telecommunications. Improving the generation of this light could extend the life of vital parts within the machines and make the manufacture of microchips more efficient.

“These findings could change the microchip industry,” said Ben Israeli, lead author of the paper publishing the results in Applied Physics Letters. Israeli is a graduate student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics, based at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), which is managed by Princeton University.