Lifeboat Foundation

The ESA is investigating hibernation technology that could allow astronauts to remain healthy during long-duration missions to Mars and beyond.

A renewed era of space exploration is upon us, and many exciting missions will be headed to space in the coming years. These include crewed missions to the Moon and the creation of permanent bases there. Beyond the Earth-Moon system, there are multiple proposals for crewed missions to Mars and beyond. This presents significant challenges since a one-way transit to Mars can take six to nine months. Even with new propulsion technologies like nuclear rockets, it could still take more than three months to get to Mars.

Continue reading “Could Astronauts Hibernate on Long Space Voyages?” »

Thermal span in a layered compound promises applications in next-generation electrical switches and nonvolatile memory.

When temperature changes, many materials undergo a phase transition, such as liquid water to ice, or a metal to a superconductor. Sometimes, a so-called hysteresis loop accompanies such a phase change, so that the transition temperatures are different depending on whether the material is cooled down or warmed up.

In a new paper in Physical Review Letters, a global research team led by MIT physics professor Nuh Gedik discovered an unusual hysteretic transition in a layered compound called EuTe₄, where the hysteresis covers a giant temperature range of over 400 kelvins. This large thermal span not only breaks the record among crystalline solids, but also promises to introduce a new type of transition in materials that possess a layered structure. These findings would create a new platform for fundamental research on hysteretic behavior in solids over extreme temperature ranges. In addition, the many metastable states residing inside the giant hysteresis loop offer ample opportunities for scientists to exquisitely control the electrical property of the material, which can find application in next-generation electrical switches or nonvolatile memory, a type of computer memory that retains data when powered off.

A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of Earth’s mass, the planet is also one of the lightest exoplanets ever found.

“The discovery shows that our closest stellar neighbour seems to be packed with interesting new worlds, within reach of further study and future exploration,” said João Faria, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Portugal, lead author of a study published today in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Proxima Centauri is a small, M-class star, lying just 4.2 light years away.

The newly discovered planet, named Proxima d, orbits Proxima Centauri at a distance of about four million kilometres, less than a tenth of Mercury’s distance from the Sun. It lies between the star and the habitable zone – the band where liquid water can exist at the surface of a planet – and takes just five days to complete one orbit around its star.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian flu in an Indiana turkey flock on Wednesday, the nation’s first case in a commercial poultry operation since 2020.

European scientists say they have made a major breakthrough in their quest to develop practical nuclear fusion — the energy process that powers the stars.

The UK-based JET laboratory has smashed its own world record for the amount of energy it can extract by squeezing together two forms of hydrogen.

Continue reading “Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy — BBC News” »

It’s not been detected here for a decade leicestermercury.

Smart cities are supposed to represent the pinnacle of technological and human advancement. They certainly deliver on that promise from a technological standpoint. Smart cities employ connected IoT networks, AI, computer vision, NLP, blockchain and similar other technologies and applications to bolster urban computing, which is utilized to optimize a variety of functions in law enforcement, healthcare, traffic management, supply chain management and countless other areas. As human advancement is more ideological than physical, measuring it comes down to a single metric—the level of equity and inclusivity in smart cities. Essentially, these factors are down to how well smart city administrators can reduce digital exclusivity, eliminate algorithmic discrimination and increase citizen engagement. Addressing the issues related to data integrity and bias in AI can resolve a majority of inclusivity problems and meet the above-mentioned objectives. make smart cities more inclusive for people and communities from all strata of society, issues related to digital exclusion and bias in AI need to be addressed by public agencies in these regions.