Lifeboat Foundation

Basically the United States has alerts for the west Nile as it seems to be spreading across many states.

As temperatures warm, US health officials are braced for rising rates of West Nile virus, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes that can cause meningitis, paralysis, and death.

Oklahoma reported its first West Nile death of the year on Thursday, in a resident who had been hospitalized with the illness.

Continue reading “US health officials brace for mosquito-borne virus that can cause paralysis and death as temperatures rise” »

A new image using data collected by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off one of the most perfect “Einstein rings” ever captured.

The atoms arranged in lines and sheets reached about 1.2 nanokelvin, more than 2 billion times colder than interstellar space. For the atoms in three-dimensional arrangements, the situation is so complex that the researchers are still figuring out the best way to measure the temperature.

The atoms in the experiment belong to a larger group called fermions and were “the coldest fermions in the universe”, says Hazzard. “Thinking about experimenting on this 10 years ago, it looked like a theorist’s dream,” he says.

Physicists have long been interested in how atoms interact in exotic magnets like this because they suspect that similar interactions happen in high-temperature superconductors – materials that perfectly conduct electricity. By better understanding what happens, they could build better superconductors.

A multinational group of scientists has made progress in the use of antiferromagnetic materials in memory storage devices.

Antiferromagnets are materials with an internal magnetic field induced by electron spin but virtually no external magnetic field. Since there is no external (or “long-range”) magnetic field, the data units, or bits, may be packed more densely inside the material, making them potentially useful for data storage.

The ferromagnets commonly utilized in typical magnetic memory devices are the opposite. These devices do have long-range magnetic fields produced by the bits that prevent them from being packed too tightly together since otherwise they would interact.

The promise of robotic furniture is that it can turn single rooms into multipurpose spaces.

“Robotics, AI, and many things will disrupt what we know now. Taking advantage of such has great benefits, especially if focused on demand”-me.

A future kitchen appliance could make it possible to 3D-print entirely new recipes and cook them with lasers.

That is the long-term vision at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab, an engineering group that uses insight from biology to research and develop autonomous systems that “create and are creative.” The engineers have spent years working to digitize and automate the cooking process.

Continue reading “3D-printed, laser-cooked meat may be the future of cooking” »

Last week, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) made the first ever detection of CO₂ on an exoplanet. Following that scientific milestone, it has now captured a direct image of another planet – HIP 65,426 b, which orbits the large A-type star HIP 65426. The system is 355 light years from Earth.

Astronomers first discovered this gas giant in July 2017, using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research (SPHERE) instrument belonging to the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

NASA made a follow-up observation to test Webb’s capabilities, using the mid-infrared part of the spectrum to reveal new information that previous telescopes would be unable to detect. The spacecraft’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) are both equipped with coronagraphs to block the glare of starlight, which can be 10,000 times brighter than planets. This enables Webb to take direct images of exoplanets.

2nd launch attempt scrubbed.

A fuel leak forced NASA to call off its second attempt to launch the Artemis 1 moon mission on Saturday (Sept. 3).

A combination of cutting-edge hardware, sensor technology, and bespoke machine learning approaches can predict trajectories of vehicles, people, and even animals, as far as 8 seconds into the future.