Lifeboat Foundation

Stanford University engineers have developed an airborne method for imaging underwater objects by combining light and sound to break through the seemingly impassable barrier at the interface of air and water.

The researchers envision their hybrid optical-acoustic system one day being used to conduct drone-based biological marine surveys from the air, carry out large-scale aerial searches of sunken ships and planes, and map the ocean depths with a similar speed and level of detail as Earth’s landscapes. Their “Photoacoustic Airborne Sonar System” is detailed in a recent study published in the journal IEEE Access.

Continue reading “Engineers combine light and sound to see underwater” »

SpaceX Starship will fly nine miles into the air later this week according to Elon Musk, who says it has a one in three chance of landing safely.

The massive Starship two-stage-to-orbit heavy lift vehicle has been in development since 2012 and is designed to bring the cost of launch down by being reusable.

Continue reading “SpaceX Starship high-altitude test has one in three chance of landing” »

Yummy?

Eat Just Inc., a maker of meat and egg substitutes, has been approved to sell its laboratory-created chicken in Singapore, which becomes the first government to allow the sale of cultured meat.

You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. But the substance scientists refer to as dark matter could account for five times as much “stuff” in the universe as the regular matter that forms everything from trees, trains and the air you breathe, to stars, planets and interstellar dust clouds.

Though scientists see the signature of dark matter indirectly in the way large objects orbit one another—particularly how stars swirl around the centers of spiral galaxies—no one knows yet what comprises this substance. One of the candidates is a Z’ boson, a fundamental particle that has been theorized to exist but never detected.

A new proposed experiment could help scientists determine whether Z’ bosons are real, in that way identifying a possible candidate for dark matter. To accomplish this task, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, the Canadian particle accelerator center TRIUMF and other collaborators are working to make the most accurate measurements to date of a nuclear property that is extremely difficult to measure, called nuclear spin-dependent parity violation (NSD-PV).

Some people might want to consider it during the pandemic. Here’s why.

UNC School of Medicine researchers identified the amino acid responsible for the trip.

Earlier in the year, many funders agreed to extend deadlines for research projects halted or delayed by the pandemic — but fewer offered extra funding to cover this period. Worryingly, most of the funders we approached still have no concrete plans to provide such additional financial support to postdocs. Many postdocs are not eligible for the government salary subsidies, or furlough schemes, that have been made available to many workers during the pandemic. Expanding access to such schemes is arguably the one intervention that could do the most to ease pressures at this time.

Most funders have no plans to provide postdoctoral researchers with additional pandemic funding. Society will pay a high price if this neglect continues.

NASA announced how much its return mission to the moon will cost, how they are going to do it and why they’re doing it.

Radar and LiDAR have been incredibly quick and effective tools for mapping and surveying the Earth’s surface from aircraft and satellites, but while they can deliver accurate readings through cloud and even forest canopy cover, they can’t tell you what’s below the surface of the sea. Seawater absorbs far too much of the signal.

Sonar remains the most effective way to map out the sea floor – but the vast majority of the oceans that form 70 percent of the Earth’s surface remain unmapped, because sonic waves have hitherto only been able to be sent out from underwater. Sound waves sent from air into water lose more than 99.9 percent of their energy in the translation; it’s why the outside world goes so wonderfully silent when you dive down to the bottom of the pool. The meagre remaining 0.1 percent of the energy does create a sonar signal, but that loses a further 99.9 percent of its energy upon coming back up from the water into the air.

Continue reading “Stanford engineers invent a sonar device that works outside the water” »