Lifeboat Foundation

On Wednesday, the Houston-based firm organizing the mission announced it had reached an agreement with SpaceX to fly three additional private crew missions to the International Space Station. The missions will run through to 2023.

It’s an exciting chance for regular people to go to space. But beyond expanding space tourism, Axiom Space’s missions could serve another ambitious idea — to develop a successor to the International Space Station.

In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself.

As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle — but now, by recreating and studying the phenomenon, physicists have figured out how it happens. Particles in the superfluid stick to the object, shielding it from interacting with the bulk superfluid, thus preventing the superfluid’s breakdown.

“Superfluid helium-3 feels like a vacuum to a rod moving through it, although it is a relatively dense liquid. There is no resistance, none at all,” said physicist Samuli Autti of Lancaster University in the UK. “I find this very intriguing.”

Scientists create a superfluid with negative mass that accelerates backwards.

Biobots could help us with new organs! 😃

Computer scientists and biologists have teamed up to create a creature heretofore unseen on Earth: a living robot. Made from the cells of frogs and designed by artificial intelligence, they’re called xenobots, and they may soon revolutionize everything from how we fight pollution to organ transplants.

Continue reading “Biological Robots May Soon Build You a Better Heart” »

For that, they will need the quantum equivalent of optical repeaters, the components of today’s telecommunications networks that keep light signals strong across thousands of kilometers of optical fiber. Several teams have already demonstrated key elements of quantum repeaters and say they’re well on their way to building extended networks. “We’ve solved all the scientific problems,” says Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University. “I’m extremely optimistic that on the scale of 5 to 10 years… we’ll have continental-scale network prototypes.”

Advance could precisely link telescopes, yield hypersecure banking and elections, and make quantum computing possible from anywhere.

All cells on Earth are made of phospholipid membranes. Now astronomers have found the component molecules in interstellar space.

One potential explanation is that the Earth was seeded from space with the building blocks for life. The idea is that space is filled with clouds of gas and dust that contain all the organic molecules necessary for life.

Indeed, astronomers have observed these buildings blocks in interstellar gas clouds. They can see amino acids, the precursors of proteins and the machinery of life. They can also see the precursors of ribonucleotides, molecules that can store information in the form of DNA.

Continue reading “First evidence of cell membrane molecules in space” »

O,.o! Woah

When heavy ions, accelerated to the speed of light, collide with each other in the depths of European or American accelerators, quark-gluon plasma is formed for fractions of a second, or even its “cocktail” seasoned with other particles. According to scientists from the IFJ PAN, experimental data show that there are underestimated actors on the scene: photons. Their collisions lead to the emission of seemingly excess particles, the presence of which could not be explained.

Quark-gluon plasma is undoubtedly the most exotic state of matter thus far known to us. In the LHC at CERN near Geneva, it is formed during central collisions of two lead ions approaching each other from opposite directions, traveling at velocities very close to that of light. This quark-gluon soup is also sometimes seasoned with other particles. Unfortunately, the theoretical description of the course of events involving plasma and a cocktail of other sources fails to describe the data collected in the experiments.

Continue reading “Creation Without Contact in the Collisions of Lead and Gold Nuclei” »

Microsoft keeps hinting at a new version of Windows.

Microsoft has been teasing a “next generation” of Windows for months now, but new hints suggest the company isn’t just preparing an update to its existing Windows 10 software, but a new, numbered version of the operating system: Windows 11.

The software giant announced a new Windows event for June 24th yesterday, promising to show “what’s next for Windows.” The event invite included an image of what looks like a new Windows logo, with light shining through the window in only two vertical bars, creating an outline that looks very much like the number 11. Microsoft followed up with an animated version of this image, making it clear the company intentionally ignored the horizontal bars.

Smashing together lead particles at 99.9999991 percent the speed of light, scientists have recreated the first matter that appeared after the Big Bang.

Out of the wreck came a primordial type of matter known as quark-gluon plasma, or QGP. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but for the first time, scientists were able to probe the plasma’s liquid-like characteristics – finding it to have less resistance to flow than any other known substance – and determine how it evolved in the first moments in the early Universe.