Lifeboat Foundation

An international team of scientists announced on Wednesday that they have discovered two new “super-Earth” planets just 100 light-years away. Both of them are significantly larger than our own planet — and one of them may even be suitable for life.

Super-Earths are a unique class of exoplanet in the solar system that are more massive than our planet but lighter than the ice giants, according to NASA. They are made by some combination of gas and rock and can get up to 10 times the size of Earth’s mass.

The findings, discovered with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the University of Liège’s Search for Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-Cool Stars (SPECULOOS), will be published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

THE JAMES Webb Space Telescope has captured new images of a distant planet in a first for the world’s top space observatory. The James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas Day in 2021 Credit: Alamy
The star pasted on the images represents the planet’s host star Credit: NASAPhotographing distant planets is extremely difficult because light from their host star will pollute the images.

The Kalam cosmological argument asserts that everything that exists has a cause, and what caused the Universe? It’s got to be God.

An exploration of the technological singularity and whether it will happen and what implications it has on astrobiology and solving the Fermi Paradox.

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Continue reading “Fermi Paradox: The Singularity and Dormant Civilizations” »

Being able to decode brainwaves could help patients who have lost the ability to speak to communicate again, and could ultimately provide novel ways for humans to interact with computers. Now Meta researchers have shown they can tell what words someone is hearing using recordings from non-invasive brain scans.

Our ability to probe human brain activity has improved significantly in recent decades as scientists have developed a variety of brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies that can provide a window into our thoughts and intentions.

The most impressive results have come from invasive recording devices, which implant electrodes directly into the brain’s gray matter, combined with AI that can learn to interpret brain signals. In recent years, this has made it possible to decode complete sentences from someone’s neural activity with 97 percent accuracy, and translate attempted handwriting movements directly into text at speeds comparable to texting.

Superintelligent AI is “likely” to cause an existential catastrophe for humanity, according to a new paper, but we don’t have to wait to rein in algorithms.

Webb takes us inside a nearby nebula to shed light on the mysteries of star formation in the recent universe.

An extraordinary phenomenon taking over the Red Planet.

NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) mission and the United Arab Emirates’ Emirates Mars Mission (EMM) revealed combined observations of proton aurora at Mars. It turns out that aurora can actually get patchy over the Martian atmosphere.

The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Continue reading “Patchy Proton Aurora at Mars: A Global View of Solar Wind Precipitation Across the Martian Dayside From EMM/EMUS” »