Lifeboat Foundation

Dr. Caroline Dorn: “The larger the planet and the greater its mass, the more the water tends to go with the iron droplets and become integrated in the core.”

Do certain exoplanets mirror Earth regarding their distribution of iron and water? This is what a recent study published in Nature Astronomy hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the evolution of exoplanets and how they form their iron core with water residing either beneath or above the surface, and whether as a liquid or gas. This study holds the potential to help researchers better understand the formation and evolution of exoplanets, which will enable scientists to provide better targets for identifying Earth-like worlds throughout the cosmos.

For the study, the researchers use computer models to simulate the formation of planetary interiors on super-Earth and sub-Neptune exoplanets, specifically with a focus on the distribution of water within a planet’s interior in relation to the additional iron and metallic composition. In the end, the researchers found that longstanding hypotheses about the formation and evolution of water worlds are challenged given the model’s results that 95 percent or more of water on an exoplanet is stored within the planet’s interior, as opposed to the surface.

Continue reading “Iron and Water: How Exoplanets’ Interiors Challenge Traditional Models” »

The mysterious case of dark energy and the universe’s fate.

Imagine the universe as a vast, ever-expanding balloon.

The largest-ever 3D map of the cosmos hints that the dark energy that’s fueling the universe’s expansion may be weakening. One community of theoretical physicists expected as much.

Continue reading “Waning Dark Energy May Evade ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes” »

There is a theory dubbed “quantum consciousness,” which stipulates that brain functions and consciousness are derived from quantum effects like the collapse of the quantum wavefunction.

This is a strange part of quantum physics, where particles go from a state of simultaneous properties to a more “normal” state where they have one defined characteristic. It has notably been popularized by the concept of Schrödinger’s cat.

One particularly promising method within ADAS involves defining agents in code and using a meta-agent—an AI that can create and improve…

S Hu, C Lu, J Clune [University of British Columbia] (2024) paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.08435 website:

Can AI agents design better AI agents?

Continue reading “Forward: The goal of ADAS is to automate the creation of these complex AI agents by not only inventing new building blocks but also by finding novel ways to combine them” »

New electromagnetic wave discovery reshapes our understanding of the impact of lightning on Earth’s magnetosphere.

And we could be in for more activity like this in the coming months.

Cosmic surveys suggest the force pulling the universe apart might not be constant after all.

By Rebecca Boyle

Imagine sitting in the center of a firework that has just exploded. After the first flash of light and heat, sparks fly off in all directions, with some streaming together into fiery filaments and others fading quickly into cold, ashy oblivion. After a moment more, the smoke is all that remains—the echo, if you will, of the firework’s big bang.

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Nuclear power is one of the most promising ways to create a clean, cheap, and consistent flow of electricity. Unfortunately, it also produces radioactive waste, which can stick around for…a very long time. However, that waste issue might just be changing thanks to a process called transmutation. A Swiss company just got approval for the first accelerator-driven nuclear reactor that can do transmutation. How does this work? Let’s take a look.

Continue reading “Energy from Nuclear Waste: Switzerland Approves first Accellerator-Driven Reactor” »

Every clear night for the last three weeks, Bob Stephens has pointed his home telescope at the same two stars in hopes of witnessing one of the most violent events in the universe—a nova explosion a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun.

The eruption, which scientists say could happen any day now, has excited the interest of major observatories worldwide, and it promises to advance our understanding of turbulent binary star systems.

Yet for all the high-tech observational power that NASA and other scientific institutions can muster, astrophysicists are relying on countless amateur astronomers like Stephens to spot the explosion first.