Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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NASA is offering everyone the opportunity to have their name sent on the 1.8-billion-mile journey to Jupiter next year.

The “Message in a Bottle” campaign (Opens in a new window) invites people to submit their names to NASA before 11:59 pm EST on Dec. 31, 2023. Those names will then be engraved on a microchip alongside a poem titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” written by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Once completed, the chip will be loaded on to NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft (Opens in a new window) scheduled for launch in October 2024. It won’t reach Jupiter until April 2030, at which point Clipper will orbit the planet and make close to 50 flybys of the Europa moon at altitudes as low as 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. The aim is to investigate whether Europa has the potential to support life.

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Join us on Wednesday, June 21 at noon Pacific for the DIY Picosatellites Hack Chat with Nathaniel Evry!

Building a satellite and putting it in orbit was until very recently something only a nation had the resources to accomplish, and even then only a select few. Oh sure, there were a few amateur satellites that somehow managed to get built on a shoestring budget and hitch a ride into space, and while their stories are deservedly the stuff of legends, satellite construction took a very long time to be democratized.

Fast forward a half-dozen or so decades, and things have changed dramatically. Satellite launches are still complex affairs — it’s still rocket science, after all — but the advent of the CubeSat format and the increased tempo of launches, both national and commercial, has pushed the barriers to private, low-budget launches way, way down. So much so, in fact, that the phrase “space startup” is no longer something to snicker about.

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Scheele said that most of the dogs are rescues coming from the Atlanta area, which is near the USDA National Detector Dog Training Center.

Before they can be trained, the dogs are tested for temperament and to make sure they can detect five basic scents. Scheele said the detector dogs have to be food-driven animals, which he said (suprisingly) all dogs are not.

“That’s pork, beef, citrus, mango and apple,” Scheele said. “That’s to prove that the dog has the capability to do it and has the temperament to work in an environment like an airport or at a cargo facility, around the darkness or chaos that goes with imported goods or that sort of thing.”

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As AI image generators continue to rock visual industries such as photography and illustration, Nikon is taking a stand against AI and on behalf of humans, cameras, and “natural intelligence.” Little Black Book reports that Nikon Peru recently partnered with the ad agency Circus Grey Peru on a new “Natural Intelligence” ad campaign.

Even though AI can now generate photorealistic images with just a simple text prompt, Nikon wants to remind everyone that the real world is full of incredible scenes that are best captured with a camera rather than imagined with AI.

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Certain plant species.

A species is a group of living organisms that share a set of common characteristics and are able to breed and produce fertile offspring. The concept of a species is important in biology as it is used to classify and organize the diversity of life. There are different ways to define a species, but the most widely accepted one is the biological species concept, which defines a species as a group of organisms that can interbreed and produce viable offspring in nature. This definition is widely used in evolutionary biology and ecology to identify and classify living organisms.

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The new 12-qubit “Tunnel Falls” chip announced by Intel packs important features into its tiny form factor that could help accelerate research in quantum computing.

Intel has announced a new 12-qubit “silicon spin” chip, Tunnel Falls, and is making it available to the research community. In addition, Intel is collaborating with the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS) at the University of Maryland’s Qubit Collaboratory (LQC), to advance quantum computing research.

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The process that powers much of life on Earth, photosynthesis, is so finely tuned that just one photon is enough to kick it off.

Scientists have long suspected that photosynthesis must be sensitive to individual photons, or particles of light, because despite the way it dominates our days, the sun’s light is surprisingly sparse at the level of individual plant cells. But only now, with the help of quantum physics, have researchers been able to watch a single packet of light begin the process in an experiment described on June 14 in the journal Nature.

“It makes sense that photosynthesis only requires a single photon, but to actually be able to measure that … is really groundbreaking,” says Sara Massey, a physical chemist at Southwestern University in Texas, who was not involved with the new research. “Being able to actually see that hands-on with the data from these experiments is very valuable.”

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