Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2149

Starlink may have launched its first African service in Nigeria, but it is choosing Kenya as the location of its first physical office on the continent.

SpaceX, parent company of the satellite internet company Starlink, recently posted a job vacancy for the position of Global Licencing Activation Manager, sub-Saharan Africa.

The successful candidate is expected to manage a portfolio of countries, interfacing internally and externally, to enable Starlink to become licenced as an Internet service provider and bring the country online, so it can serve people and enterprises around the world in the near future.

Read more | >

The mini-halos of dark matter scattered throughout the cosmos could function as highly sensitive probes of primordial magnetic fields. This is what emerges from a theoretical study conducted by SISSA and published in Physical Review Letters.

Present on immense scales, magnetic fields are found everywhere in the universe. However, their origin is still a subject of debate among scholars. An intriguing possibility is that magnetic fields originated near the birth of the universe itself; that is, they are primordial magnetic fields.

In the study, the researcher showed that if magnetic fields are indeed primordial then it could cause an increase in dark matter density perturbations on small scales. The ultimate effect of this process would be the formation of mini-halos of dark matter, which, if detected, would hint towards a primordial nature of magnetic fields. Thus, in an apparent paradox, the invisible part of our universe could be useful in resolving the nature of a component of the visible one.

Read more | >

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute have developed a synthetic pathway that can capture CO2 from the air more efficiently than in nature, and shown how to implement it into living bacteria. The technique could help make biofuels and other products in a sustainable way.

Plants are famous for their ability to convert carbon dioxide from the air into chemical energy to fuel their growth. With way too much CO2 in the atmosphere already and more being blasted out every day, it’s no wonder scientists are turning to this natural process to help rein levels back in, while producing fuels and other useful molecules on the side.

In the new study, Max Planck scientists developed a brand new CO2-fixation pathway that works even better than nature’s own tried-and-true method. They call it the THETA cycle, and it uses 17 different biocatalysts to produce a molecule called acetyl-CoA, which is a key building block in a range of biofuels, materials and pharmaceuticals.

Read more | >

A quarter century ago, physicist Juan Maldacena proposed the AdS/CFT correspondence, an intriguing holographic connection between gravity in a three-dimensional universe and quantum physics on the universe’s two-dimensional boundary. This correspondence is at this stage, even a quarter century after Maldacena’s discovery, just a conjecture.

A statement about the nature of the universe that seems to be true, but one that has not yet been proven to actually reflect the reality that we live in. And what’s more, it only has limited utility and application to the real universe.

Still, even the mere appearance of the correspondence is more than suggestive. It’s telling that there is something deeply fundamental to the hologram, that the physics of the volume of the universe might just translate to the physics on the surface, and that there is more to be learned there.

Read more | >

With more of us looking for alternatives to eating animals, new research has found a surprising environmentally friendly source of protein – algae.

The University of Exeter study has been published in The Journal of Nutrition and is the first of its kind to demonstrate that the ingestion of two of the most commercially available algal species are rich in protein which supports muscle remodeling in young healthy adults. Their findings suggest that algae may be an interesting and sustainable alternative to animal-derived protein with respect to maintaining and building muscle.

Researcher Ino Van Der Heijden from the University of Exeter said: “Our work has shown algae could become part of a secure and sustainable food future. With more and more people trying to eat less meat because of ethical and environmental reasons, there is growing interest in nonanimal-derived and sustainably produced protein. We believe it’s important and necessary to start looking into these alternatives and we’ve identified algae as a promising novel protein source.”

Read more | >