Lifeboat Foundation

The number of Star Trek sci-fi technology that ultimately became real-life tech never ceases to amaze. The series inspired the development of touchscreens, communicators became mobile phones, PAADs became tablets, replicators became 3D printing, and now holodecks are becoming virtual and augmented realities (VRs and ARs). And while fully immersive environments like the holodeck still remain in the realm of sci-fi, a recent report from BBC on a hologram zoo indicates that the future isn’t so far-fetched when it comes to immersive holographic.

The holograms use a new depth technology that not only makes the animals seem big but makes them visible as 3D objects rather than suspended 2D images.

According to the report, the visitors of Australia’s Hologram Zoo, which opened earlier this year, can dodge stampeding elephants, peer into the gaping jaws of a hippopotamus, pet-friendly giraffes, and witness more than 50 lifelike displays from dinosaurs to gorillas—all crafted from concentrated beams of light.

An huge volcanic comet, 12P/Pons-Brooks, has violently exploded for the second time in four months and it is heading towards the Earth. It will not hit the Earth but we could see it in the night sky around April 21, 2024.

It has a solid nucleus, with an estimated diameter of 18.6 miles (30 kilometers), and is filled with a mix of ice, dust and gas known as cryomagma. The comet is about three times bigger than Mount Everest. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was between 10 and 15 kilometers wide.

12P is currently hurtling toward the inner solar system, where it will be slingshotted around the sun on its highly elliptical 71-year orbit around the sun.

NASA recently built and tested an additively-manufactured – or 3D printed – rocket engine nozzle made of aluminum, making it lighter than conventional nozzles and setting the course for deep space flights that can carry more payloads.

The idea of a water world, a planet covered by water, has fascinated both scientists and artists for centuries. For scientists, a water world is a planet that has a great deal of water on its surface (or beneath the surface). Some studies have suggested that exoplanets with oceans are common in the Milky Way, but we haven’t really been able to find them.

This is where GJ 1,214 b comes in.

This planet (also called Gliese 1,214 b or Enaiposha) is 48 lightyears away from Earth. It’s a “sub Neptune” or “mini Neptune.” Mini Neptunes are a type of planet less massive than Neptune but resembling Neptune in general structure and in that they lack a thick hydrogen-helium atmosphere.

One problem with a return mission to Neptune is that a flyby focused solely on that world does not provide significant bang for the buck. Without the lucky alignment available to missions in the 1970s and ’80s, we’d have to spend even more fuel to send a probe in that direction, and we wouldn’t get that much more science than we did decades ago.

The next logical step after a successful flyby mission is an orbiter, but the extreme distance to Neptune poses significant challenges. We have no clear way to haul a large enough orbiter to the Neptune system, pack enough fuel to allow it to slow down and do it all in a reasonably short amount of time.

However, researchers have shared a radical new idea for how to overcome these challenges: Use the thin atmosphere of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, to capture a spacecraft.

WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (Reuters) — Astronomers have detected an intense flash of radio waves coming from what looks like a merger of galaxies dating to about 8 billion years ago — the oldest-known instance of a phenomenon called a fast radio burst that continues to defy explanation.

This burst in less than a millisecond unleashed the amount of energy our sun emits in three decades, researchers said. It was detected using the Australian SKA Pathfinder, a radio telescope in the state of Western Australia. Its location was pinpointed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, one of the most powerful optical telescopes.

A fast radio burst, or FRB, is a pulse of radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation. It lasts a small fraction of a second but outshines most other sources of radio waves in the universe. Radio waves have the longest wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

A new electrical method to conveniently change the direction of electron flow in some quantum materials could have implications for the development of next-generation electronic devices and quantum computers.

A team of researchers from Penn State developed and demonstrated the method in materials that exhibit the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect—a phenomenon in which the flow of electrons along the edge of a material does not lose energy. The team described the work in a paper in the journal Nature Materials.

“As electronic devices get smaller and computational demands get larger, it is increasingly important to find ways to improve the efficiency of information transfer, which includes the control of electron flow,” said Cui-Zu Chang, Henry W. Knerr Early Career Professor and associate professor of physics at Penn State and co-corresponding author of the paper. “The QAH effect is promising because there is no energy loss as electrons flow along the edges of materials.”

It’s inspired by Iron Man.

The super-special material graphene continues to surprise and fascinate scientists, this time revealing a rare electronic state termed ‘ferro-valleytricity’, which occurs when graphene is stacked up in a particular five-layer combination.

When in this new state, the graphene stack exhibits weird and wonderful magnetic and electronic behavior, as reported by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

Using graphene in this way could help in the development of both classical and quantum computers, according to the team, especially in terms of creating data storage solutions that offer large capacities but that also need relatively little energy to run.