Lifeboat Foundation

Hyderabad-based private space startup, Skyroot Aerospace, is set to launch its, and India’s first private rocket between November 12 and 16 from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) Sriharikota launchpad. The rocket, named Vikram-S, will be the first space launch vehicle manufactured and operated entirely by a private company in the country — making this the first launch of its kind since the union government opened up the space sector for private industry participation in June 2020.

The final date of the launch mission will be confirmed depending on the prevalent weather conditions during the mentioned launch window. Naga Bharath Daka, chief operating officer of Skyroot, confirmed in a statement that the launch mission will be a suborbital spaceflight, and will carry three customer payloads to the intended orbit.

Typically, a suborbital spaceflight refers to a height of around 100km from the Earth surface, and is done at a lower altitude than an orbital flight, which reaches at least a low-Earth orbit — between around 200km to 2,000km from Earth.

I’ve funded Ukraine media, the Ukraine army, and now I just funded the Ukraine navy. The navy part is extra interesting because it is “the world’s first naval fleet of drones”. That is pretty futuristic!

As Elon Musk said, “Future wars are all about the drones.”

Small and fast unmanned ships 3 russian vessels were damaged, including the Admiral Makarov, flagship of the russian Black Sea Fleet. This is the first case in history where the attack was carried out exclusively by unmanned vessels.

Continue reading “The Naval Fleet of Drones” »

This theolocution has been released early in an ad-free audio version for TOE members at http://theoriesofeverything.org.

Sponsors:
- Drink Trade: https://www.drinktrade.com/everything for 30% off.
- Ro Man: https://ro.co/curt for 20% off first order.
- Masterworks: https://masterworks.art/toe.

Continue reading “The Global Mind, Collective Intelligence, Agency, and Morphogenesis — Michael Levin Λ Joscha Bach” »

In a disgusting move, cybercriminals published the personal medical details of individual patients to the internet this week.

When 2D layered materials are made thinner (i.e., at the atomic scale), their properties can dramatically change, sometimes resulting in the emergence of entirely new features and in the loss of others. While new or emerging properties can be very advantageous for the development of new technologies, retaining some of the material’s original properties is often equally important.

Researchers at Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Frontier Science Center for Quantum Information have recently been able to realize tailored Ising superconductivity in a sample of intercalated bulk niobium diselenide (NbSe₂), a characteristic of bulk NbSe₂ that is typically compromised in atomically thin layers. The methods they used, outlined in a paper published in Nature Physics, could pave the way towards the fabrication of 2D thin-layered superconducting materials.

“Atomically thin 2D materials exhibit interesting properties that are often distinct from their bulk materials, which consist of hundreds and thousands of layers,” Shuyun Zhou, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, atomically thin films/flakes are difficult to fabricate, and the emerging new properties are sometimes achieved by sacrificing some other important properties.”

“Dwell fatigue” is a phenomenon that can occur in titanium alloys when held under stress, such as a jet engine’s fan disc during takeoff. This peculiar failure mode can initiate microscopic cracks that drastically reduce a component’s lifetime.

The most widely used titanium alloy, Ti-6Al-4V, was not believed to exhibit dwell fatigue before the 2017 Air France Flight 66 incident, in which an Airbus en route from Paris to Los Angeles suffered fan disc failure over Greenland that forced an emergency landing. The analysis of that incident and several more recent concerns prompted the Federal Aviation Administration and European Union Aviation Safety Agency to coordinate work across the aerospace industry to determine the root causes of dwell fatigue.

According to experts, metals deform predominantly via dislocation slip—the movement of line defects in the underlying crystal lattice. Researchers hold that dwell fatigue can initiate when slip is restricted to narrow bands instead of occurring more homogenously in three dimensions. The presence of nanometer-scale intermetallic Ti3Al precipitates promotes band formation, particularly when processing conditions allow for their long-range ordering.

When Courtney “CJ” Johnson pulls up footage from her Ph.D. dissertation, it’s like she’s watching an attempted break-in on a home security camera.

The intruder cases its target without setting a foot inside, looking for a point of entry. But this intruder is not your typical burglar. It’s a virus.

Continue reading “Watch a virus in the moments right before it attacks” »

Cosmological observations of the orbits of stars and galaxies enable clear conclusions to be drawn about the attractive gravitational forces that act between the celestial bodies.

The astonishing finding: Visible matter is far from sufficient for being able to explain the development or movements of galaxies. This suggests that there exists another, so far unknown, type of matter. Accordingly, in the year 1933, the Swiss physicist and astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred the existence of what is known now as dark matter. Dark matter is a postulated form of matter which isn’t directly visible but interacts via gravity, and consists of approximately five times more mass than the matter with which we are familiar.

Recently, following a precision experiment developed at the Albert Einstein Center for Fundamental Physics (AEC) at the University of Bern, an international research team succeeded in significantly narrowing the scope for the existence of dark matter. With more than 100 members, the AEC is one of the leading international research organizations in the field of particle physics. The findings of the team, led by Bern, have now been published in Physical Review Letters.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been detected by satellites orbiting Earth as luminous flashes of the most energetic gamma-ray radiation lasting milliseconds to hundreds of seconds. These catastrophic blasts occur in distant galaxies, billions of light years from Earth.

A sub-type of GRB known as a short-duration GRB starts life when two neutron stars collide. These ultra-dense stars have the mass of our sun compressed down to half the size of a city like London, and in the final moments of their life, just before triggering a GRB, they generate ripples in space-time—known to astronomers as gravitational waves.

Until now, space scientists have largely agreed that the “engine” powering such energetic and short-lived bursts must always come from a newly formed black hole (a region of space-time where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from it). However, new research by an international team of astrophysicists, led by Dr. Nuria Jordana-Mitjans at the University of Bath, is challenging this scientific orthodoxy.