Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Falling through the Solar System at an astonishing 635,266 kilometers (394,736 miles) per hour, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has just smashed the record for fastest object ever to be created by human hands.

The event on September 27 marks the turning point of the mission’s 17th loop around the Sun as it collects data on the heated winds of charged particles and violent magnetism that surround our closest star, and comes just under three years after its previous record of 586,863.4 kilometers (364,660 miles) per hour.

At these speeds, it’d be possible for an aircraft to circumnavigate our planet roughly 15 times in a single hour, or zoom from New York to Los Angeles in just over 20 seconds.

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Centenarians, once considered rare, have become commonplace. Indeed, they are the fastest-growing demographic group of the world’s population, with numbers roughly doubling every ten years since the 1970s.

How long humans can live, and what determines a long and healthy life, have been of interest for as long as we know. Plato and Aristotle discussed and wrote about the ageing process over 2,300 years ago.

The pursuit of understanding the secrets behind exceptional longevity isn’t easy, however. It involves unravelling the complex interplay of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors and how they interact throughout a person’s life.

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Caltech researchers have discovered Hubbard excitons, which are excitons bound magnetically, offering new avenues for exciton-based technological applications.

In art, the negative space in a painting can be just as important as the painting itself. Something similar is true in insulating materials, where the empty spaces left behind by missing electrons play a crucial role in determining the material’s properties. When a negatively charged electron is excited by light, it leaves behind a positive hole. Because the hole and the electron are oppositely charged, they are attracted to each other and form a bond. The resulting pair, which is short-lived, is known as an exciton [pronounced exit-tawn].

Excitons are integral to many technologies, such as solar panels, photodetectors, and sensors. They are also a key part of light-emitting diodes found in televisions and digital display screens. In most cases, the exciton pairs are bound by electrical, or electrostatic, forces, also known as Coulomb interactions.

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