Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s X-59 QueSST (Quiet Supersonic Technology) aircraft is on the brink of making history, as it nears its highly anticipated maiden flight.

Designed to break the sound barrier without producing the disruptive sonic boom traditionally associated with supersonic speeds, the X-59 promises to revolutionize air travel.

With a sleek design and innovative technology, the aircraft has the potential to open up a new era of quieter supersonic flights, particularly over land—a feat that has been unattainable since the era of the Concorde.

The moon’s glow meets a multicolored aurora in a new astronaut image from space.

International Space Station (ISS) and NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, a veteran photographer of the Expedition 71 crew, captured the moon and auroras from his perch 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.

A new study provides evidence that Mars contains a large ocean deep beneath its surface.

The finding is based on data collected by the InSight Lander, a robotic explorer operated by the American space agency NASA. InSight, which landed in 2018, was designed to capture data from within the planet’s interior. The lander ended its operations on Mars in late 2022.

For the current study, researchers used seismic data collected by InSight. The team examined the data to study Martian quake activity. Seismic activity on Mars happens in the form of “marsquakes.” NASA says InSight had recorded more than 1,300 marsquakes.

A team of AI researchers at Sakana AI, in Japan, working with colleagues from the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia, has developed an AI system that can conduct scientific research autonomously.

The group has posted a paper to the arXiv preprint server describing their system, which they call “The AI Scientist”. They have also posted an overview of their system on Sakana’s corporate website.

Scientific research is generally a long and involved process. It tends to start with a simple idea, such as, “Is there a way to stop the buildup of plaque on human teeth?” Scientists then research other studies to determine what research has been done on the topic.

Imaging the 4D choreography of subcellular events in living multicellular organisms at high spatiotemporal resolution could reveal life’s fundamental principles. Yet extracting these principles from petabyte-scale image data requires fusing advanced light microscopy and cutting-edge machine learning models with biological insight and expertise.

In an unexpected turn of events, a two-week archaeological dig unearthed a remarkably intact mastodon skull in a creek that might carry signs of human life too.

Over twelve days, archaeologists unearthed several mastodon bones. However, the skull, being “the first-ever well-preserved” artifact of its kind, makes it a significant find with potential connections to human history.

“We’re really hoping to find evidence of human interaction with this creature — perhaps the projectile points and knives that were used to kill the animal and do initial butchering,” John Doershuk, director and state archaeologist at the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist (OSA) said.

A possible solution to the dark matter problem.

As the early universe cooled and expanded, phase transitions might have left “bubble walls,” energetic barriers between pockets of space.

Physicists and cosmologists will have a new probe of primordial processes when Europe launches the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) next decade.

Continue reading “Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft” »

A new open-access RNA sequencing dataset, MAGE, of 731 individuals across geographically diverse human populations provides a valuable resource to study genetic diversity and evolution and expands the capacity to identify new genetic associations.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Most of his stories, however, are less philosophically explicit. Lovecraft’s thought is often obscured in his tales, and must be pieced together from various sources, including his poetry, essays and, most importantly, his letters. Lovecraft wrote an estimated 100,000 during his life, of which around 10,000 have survived. Within this substantial non-fictional output, the volume of which dwarfs his fictional writing, Lovecraft expounded the philosophical concerns – whether metaphysical, ethical, political or aesthetic – which he claimed underpinned his weird fiction. These tales, he wrote, were based on one fundamental cosmic premise: ‘that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large’

In H P Lovecraft: The Decline of the West (1990), the scholar S T Joshi analysed many of those letters and essays to create an image of ‘Lovecraft the philosopher’. Joshi claimed that Lovecraft’s identity as a philosopher is a direct outcome of the genre he mastered: weird fiction. This genre, Joshi writes, is inherently philosophical because ‘it forces the reader to confront directly such issues as the nature of the universe and mankind’s place in it.’ Not everyone has agreed that Lovecraft’s thought should be so elevated. The Austrian literary critic Franz Rottensteiner, in a review of Joshi’s book, attacked the idea of Lovecraft as a philosopher: ‘The point is, of course, that Lovecraft as a thinker just wasn’t of any importance,’ he wrote ‘whether as a materialist, an aestheticist, or a moral philosopher.’