Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers demonstrate a new technique for suppressing back reflections of light—better signal quality for sensing and information technology.

Microresonators are small glass structures in which light can circulate and build up in intensity. Due to material imperfections, some amount of light is reflected backwards, which is disturbing their function.

Continue reading “Trapping light without back reflections” »

With Starship SN8’s test flight still fresh in the memory, SN9 is set to complete an accelerated pad flow with a Static Fire test and launch this coming week. A triple Raptor Static Fire test is tracking early this week. Pending acceptable test results, the launch of SN9 could take place just a few days later.

Meanwhile, Starship SN10 is now an integrated stack inside the High Bay, ready to roll to the launch site as soon as SN9 departs. SN11 and SN12 are undergoing their own buildup operations inside the Mid Bay, with the former only lacking a nosecone.

From an observatory high above Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe.

Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – give or take 40 million years. A Cornell researcher co-authored one of two papers about the findings, which add a fresh twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community.

The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to ’13.

Proteins are essential to cells, carrying out complex tasks and catalyzing chemical reactions. Scientists and engineers have long sought to harness this power by designing artificial proteins that can perform new tasks, like treat disease, capture carbon or harvest energy, but many of the processes designed to create such proteins are slow and complex, with a high failure rate.

In a breakthrough that could have implications across the healthcare, agriculture, and energy sectors, a team lead by researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago has developed an artificial intelligence-led process that uses big data to design new proteins.

By developing machine-learning models that can review protein information culled from genome databases, the researchers found relatively simple design rules for building artificial proteins. When the team constructed these artificial proteins in the lab, they found that they performed chemical processes so well that they rivaled those found in nature.

BREAKING: U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says England will go into a “national lockdown.”

“That means the government is once again instructing you to stay at home.” https://abcn.ws/2Llledb

Circa2016 photonic propulsion.

There’s no argument in the astronomical community—rocket-propelled spacecraft can take us only so far. The SLS will likely take us to Mars, and future rockets might be able to help us reach even more distant points in the solar system. But Voyager 1 only just left the solar system, and it was launched in 1977. The problem is clear: we cannot reach other stars with rocket fuel. We need something new.

Continue reading “Lasers Could Send a Spacecraft to Mars in As Little As 3 Days” »

Polymers could be used to create less expensive gene therapies or vaccines for diseases.

An international team of astronomers has investigated a nearby emission nebula and star-forming region dubbed the Cat’s Paw Nebula as part of the B-field In STar-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey. Results of this study, presented in a paper published December 24 on arXiv.org, provide essential information about the structure of the object’s complex magnetic field.

At a distance of some 4240 light years away, the Cat’s Paw Nebula (other designations: NGC 6334, Gum 64) is a high-mass star-forming complex that lies within the galactic plane. The nebula has a form of a filamentary cloud structure spanning 1000 light years and hosts several star-forming regions.

Observations show that NGC 6334 is dominated by both a dense ridge threaded by sub-filaments, and by two hub-like structures towards its Northeast end. Astronomers have found that this ridge itself is in the process of active high-mass star formation and ultra-compact HII regions, maser sources, and molecular outflows have been identified along or next to its crest. However, although column density and velocity structures of the nebula’s both filaments and hubs have been thoroughly studied, still very little is known about its magnetic field (B-field).