Lifeboat Foundation

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The steady stream of news continues. Where we had unexpected explosive things to dive into last week, this week a much more positive, planned and progressive run of testing at SpaceX’s Starbase. SpaceX Starship Pressure Builds, Starbase 2 also screaming forward. Starlink Breaks Record with Starlink with an almost relentless cadence of Falcon 9 hurling launch after launch into orbit. Loads more to talk about with the wonders coming from the JWST, a bunch of news with Relativity Space Terran 1 and much more. Welcome to yet another incredible week.

Continue reading “SpaceX Starship Pressure Builds, Starlink Breaks Record, JWST, Relativity Space Terran 1 and more” »

Each potential flight will last more than a month.

With that out of the way, Artemis I should be able to fly in late August or early September.

The automotive industry has a ‘million-mile’ dream for electric vehicles, but it’s a boring one. They want to build a battery capable of being recharged over and over as many times as it takes to reach a million miles without losing its ability to retain a charge. Yawn.

We’re more interested in the cutting-edge quantum physics version of a million-mile battery: one that can last a million miles between charges.

This would effectively eliminate the need for the bulk of vehicle operators to ever charge their batteries. Even heavy-use owners could just pop into the shop for routine maintenance every couple of years to top their batteries off.

A potential cure for haemophilia B has been announced by British doctors, which corrects the genetic defect associated with the condition.

Circa 2016

Take advantage of the next clear night and drop in on a quasar that’s currently undergoing its brightest outburst in more than 40 years.

Continue reading “Quasar CTA 102: Historically Bright, Violently Variable” »

Circa 2019

Yuri Oganessian relates the story of the formation and decay of a doubly odd moscovium nucleus.

Element 115 was the first superheavy element with an odd atomic number (Z) that we synthesized in nuclear reactions using a beam of accelerated ⁴⁸ Ca ions. These experiments were carried out in 2003, on the heels of the first results obtained for even elements 114 and 116. We had no doubts that their odd neighbour could also be produced in a similar manner; its decay properties however would be very different.

Circa 2021

Astrophysicist at Göttingen University discovers new theoretical hyper-fast soliton solutions.

If travel to distant stars within an individual’s lifetime is going to be possible, a means of faster-than-light propulsion will have to be found. To date, even recent research about superluminal (faster-than-light) transport based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity would require vast amounts of hypothetical particles and states of matter that have “exotic” physical properties such as negative energy density. This type of matter either cannot currently be found or cannot be manufactured in viable quantities. In contrast, new research carried out at the University of Göttingen gets around this problem by constructing a new class of hyper-fast ‘solitons’ using sources with only positive energies that can enable travel at any speed. This reignites debate about the possibility of faster-than-light travel based on conventional physics. The research is published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Continue reading “Breaking the Warp Barrier for Faster-Than-Light Travel: New Theoretical Hyper-Fast Solitons Discovered” »