Lifeboat Foundation

Anyone who has visited the small island of Venice, full of its romantic canals and pedestrian paths with abrupt dead ends aplenty, knows that distance does not always go hand in hand with navigational ease. Fifteen years ago, NASA performed one of its most complex navigational routes to reach the Solar System’s smallest planet: Mercury. The MESSENGER mission made its first flyby of Mercury 15 years ago today, January 14, 2008, with two more flybys of the planet after, with NASA finally inserting it into orbit on April 4, 2011.

Between its launch on April 3, 2004, at Cape Canaveral and its orbital insertion in 2011, MESSENGER had a total of six flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. However, these weren’t just passive flybys; they were gravitational assists. Sean Solomon, the principal investigator of the MESSENGER mission and former director / current adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, tells Inverse that the challenge isn’t so much getting to Mercury, but getting into orbit.

“By celestial mechanics, if you send a spacecraft in towards the Sun and gain speed from the gravitational well of the Sun without slowing down en route, the speed is about 10 km/s,” Solomon explains. “That’s too fast to do an orbital insertion with a propulsive burn using any conventional propulsion system that you can carry.”

In the first case of its kind, artificial intelligence (AI) will be present throughout an entire U.S. court proceeding, when it helps to defend against a speeding ticket.

San Francisco-based DoNotPay has developed “the world’s first robot lawyer” – an AI that can be installed on a mobile device. The company’s stated goal is to “level the playing field and make legal information and self-help accessible to everyone.”

The battery resolves a longstanding technological issue that no other battery design has ever addressed.

Micro batteries have the incredible potential to power microdevices, microrobots, and implantable medical devices. However, up to recently they have not been very efficient as they lacked power.

Unlocking the potential of smaller devices.

Continue reading “Researchers create microbattery that could power insect-sized robots” »

The ride held the title of longest roller coaster in the world from 1991 to 2000.

Europe’s longest roller coaster, the Ultimate at Lightwater Valley in the UK, will soon be dismantled, according to a post on the ride’s website.

“The ride has been out of service for some years now and the process of assessing the viability of bringing it back into use was a long one.”

Continue reading “The Ultimate: Europe’s longest roller coaster to be dismantled” »

Rasi Bhadramani/iStock.

Now, an artificial pancreas also called a closed-loop system, may provide relief for people with type 1 diabetes, according to a post on BMJ published on Tuesday.

The company captures and transforms excessive CO₂ emissions into rocks, and buries it underground.

The world’s first company to successfully absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and permanently store it underground for a paying customer has announced success.

“Providing our first corporate customers with CDR services is an exciting milestone we’re proud to reach with the rigorous validation of a certifying 3rd party,” said Christoph Gebald, co-CEO/founder of Climeworks.

Continue reading “Climeworks becomes world’s 1st certified carbon removal service provider” »

Making predictions is never easy, but it is agreed that cryptography will be altered by the advent of quantum computers.

Thirteen, 53, and 433. That’s the size of quantum computers.

Hh5800/iStock.

Continue reading “Quantum computers: How scientists can shield against cyber attacks” »

This process can occur endlessly and allows the jellyfish to escape death.

Achieving immortality has driven human beings throughout much of their history. Many peculiar legends and fables have been told about the search for the elixirs of life. Medieval alchemists worked tirelessly to find the formula for the philosopher’s stone, which granted rejuvenating powers. Another well-known story is the travels of Juan Ponce de León, who searched for the mysterious fountain of youth while conquering the New World.

But to this day, no one has discovered the keys to eternal life. However, there is one exception — a creature no more than four millimeters in size, Turritopsis dohrnii.

Continue reading “Immortal jellyfish: Scientists are deciphering genes to learn secrets” »

State-of-the-art methods of information security are likely to be compromised by emerging technologies such as quantum computers. One of the reasons they are vulnerable is that both encrypted messages and the keys to decrypt them must be sent from sender to receiver.

A new method—called COSMOCAT—is proposed and demonstrated, which removes the need to send a decryption key since cosmic rays transport it for us, meaning that even if messages are intercepted, they could not be read using any theorized approach. COSMOCAT could be useful in localized various bandwidth applications, as there are limitations to the effective distance between sender and receiver.

In the field of information communication technology, there is a perpetual arms race to find ever more secure ways to transfer data, and ever more sophisticated ways to break them. Even the first modern computers were essentially code-breaking machines used by the U.S. and European Allies during World War II. And this race is about to enter a new regime with the advent of quantum computers, capable of breaking current forms of security with ease. Even security methods which use quantum computers themselves might be susceptible to other quantum attacks.