Lifeboat Foundation

How possible?

Wozniak’s Privateer Space hopes to address the growing orbital debris problem.

The study, published in Physical Review Letters, used historic records between 1962–64 from a research station in Scotland. Scientists compared days with high and low radioactively-generated charge, finding that clouds were visibly thicker, and there was 24% more rain on average on the days with more radioactivity.

Professor Giles Harrison, lead author and Professor of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Reading, said: By studying the radioactivity released from Cold War weapons tests, scientists at the time learnt about atmospheric circulation patterns. We have now reused this data to examine the effect on rainfall.

The politically charged atmosphere of the Cold War led to a nuclear arms race and worldwide anxiety. Decades later, that global cloud has yielded a silver lining, in giving us a unique way to study how electric charge affects rain.

“The door is open now. The view is pretty incredible.”

Watch four “amateur astronauts” and a floating stuffed dog go to space.

The four crew members — Shift4 Payments founder Jared Isaacman, scientist Sian Proctor, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee Hayley Arceneaux, and aeronautical engineer Chris Sembroski — are the first all-civilian crew to fly aboard a private vehicle to low-Earth orbit.

Continue reading “Watch: Civilian astronauts depart Earth on Inspiration4 mission” »

Researchers have developed a new method that can automatically produce clear images through murky water. The new technology could be useful for searching for drowning victims, documenting submerged archaeological artifacts and monitoring underwater farms.

Imaging clearly underwater is extremely challenging because the water and the particles in it tend to scatter light. But, because scattered light is partially polarized, imaging using a camera that is sensitive to polarization can be used to suppress scattered light in underwater images.

“Our new method overcomes the limitations of traditional polarimetric underwater imaging, laying the groundwork for taking this method out of the lab and into the field,” said research team leader Haofeng Hu from Tianjin University in China. “Unlike previous methods, there’s no requirement for the image to include a background area to estimate the backscattered light.”

Are they being tugged by Planet Nine?

A six-year search of space beyond the orbit of Neptune has netted 461 newly discovered objects.

These objects include four that are more than 230 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (An astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 93 million miles or 149.6 million kilometers). These extraordinarily distant objects might shed light on Planet Nine, a theoretical, never-observed body that might be hiding in deep space, its gravity affecting the orbits of some of the rocky objects at the solar system’s edge.

Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission launched Wednesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida just after 8 p.m.

During their live-streamed ascent, some of the crew gave a “thumbs up” and pumped their fists in the air in celebration of the successful liftoff.

The four private citizens — two men and two women — will spend three days circling the world at an altitude of 335 miles — about 75 miles higher than the International Space Station and on a level with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The dying star’s light passes through the center of a gargantuan galaxy cluster — and dark matter is giving it a wild ride.

Space has seen a number of high-profile, incredibly rich tourists in the past few months. The so-called “billionaire space race” kicked off in July, when Richard Branson rode his Virgin Galactic space plane to the upper layers of Earth’s atmosphere. Shortly after, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode his rocket a little further. Whether they made it to “space,” though, has been hotly debated. Most space watchers agree these short suborbital trips aren’t quite the same as getting into low Earth orbit.

There will be no debate about the Inspiration4 mission. This flight takes the crew of four higher than Bezos or Branson and is different from those flights in key ways, even if it was bankrolled by another billionaire in Isaacman.

Continue reading “SpaceX Inspiration4 mission blasts off on history-making journey to orbit” »

We need robots as workers it would speed up things maybe a thousand fold. Humans are not made for the grueling labor that robots can do easily. Unless we give workers like ironman suits humans do better work as coders or the ones repairing the machines.

Logistics managers are battling the pandemic, a labor shortage, and huge demand to get goods to your front door.