Lifeboat Foundation

CREATING ARTIFICIAL SKIES IN UNDERGROUND HABITATS ON MARS & MERCURY. This will be an interesting subject for much deliberation in the future: how to best create artificial skies in sealed habitats. Metamaterial vantablack is a surface so perfectly dark that if you stood in a room where the ceiling, walls and floor were covered with it, you would feel like you were floating in black space. Disneyland must get off its butt and create a big room like this. Now a new paint (not quite the opposite of vantablack as it claims) has been invented, which will reflect back nearly 100% of light hitting it, an interesting way to augment existing lighting in a building by painting the ceiling with the stuff.

And here is something which I told you before: if the human eye stares at a totally uniform color, with no discernable features it doesn’t know where to focus, and psychologically can see this as a kind of “sky.” Since there is nothing to focus on, the eye assumes it is the far away sky and focusses to infinity or goes into its least-energetic focusing mode, as in looking at a blank sky.

View a large computer screen with a totally uniform color, through a tube which blocks the edge of the screen from view. You already see this effect with this small experiment.

Continue reading “This Whiter-Than-White Paint Is Like the Opposite of Vantablack” »

S.B. 50 — Animal Shelter AmendmenEuthanasia by Injection, sponsored by Sen. Knudson For the fourth year in a row, we will be supporting a bill to ban the use of gas chambers for animal euthanasia. Utah is one of four states where a handful of animal shelters are still using the outdated and inhumane method of gas chamber euthanasia.

The Beresheet lunar lander carried thousands of books, DNA samples, and a few thousand water bears to the moon. But did any of it survive the crash?

Crews working on the largest U.S. experiment designed to directly detect dark matter completed a major milestone last month, and are now turning their sights toward startup after experiencing some delays due to global pandemic precautions.

U.S. Department of Energy officials on Sept. 21 formally signed off on project completion for LUX-ZEPLIN, or LZ: an ultrasensitive experiment that will use 10 metric tons of liquid xenon to hunt for signals of interactions with theorized dark matter particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. DOE’s project completion milestone is called Critical Decision 4, or CD-4.

Dark matter makes up an estimated 85 percent of all matter in the universe. We know it’s there because of its observed gravitational effects on normal matter, but we don’t yet know what it is. LZ is designed to detect the two flashes of light that occur if a WIMP interacts with the nucleus of a xenon atom.

« Today we announced the first in a series of upcoming commitments from our international partners to support our Artemis plans. NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have signed an agreement committing our space agencies to building the Gateway together. As our outpost in lunar orbit, the Gateway is critical for sustainable exploration of the Moon as well as testing systems and operations for future missions to Mars.

With this Memorandum of Understanding, ESA will provide an additional habitation element, enhanced lunar communications, and a refueling capability to the Gateway later this decade. They will also provide two more European service modules for future Orion spacecraft.

We are honored by this agreement with ESA and, again, it is one of several to come with our international partners. Exploration requires more than hardware though – and that is why this commitment with ESA includes opportunities for European astronauts to fly with NASA astronauts on future Artemis missions to the Gateway. »

Scientists today are quick to point out that they are still basing their models on life as we know it: Carbon-based and reliant on organic compounds and water…

In 2001, the first author (S.N.) led the publication of a book entitled “Geochemistry and the origin of life” in collaboration with Dr. Andre Brack aiming to figure out geo- and astro-chemical processes essential for the emergence of life. Since then, a great number of research progress has been achieved in the relevant topics from our group and others, ranging from the extraterrestrial inputs of life’s building blocks, the chemical evolution on Earth with the aid of mineral catalysts, to the fossilized records of ancient microorganisms. Here, in addition to summarizing these findings for the origin and early evolution of life, we propose a new hypothesis for the generation and co-evolution of photosynthesis with the redox and photochemical conditions on the Earth’s surface. Besides these bottom-up approaches, we introduce an experimental study on the role of water molecules in the life’s function, focusing on the transition from live, dormant, and dead states through dehydration/hydration. Further spectroscopic studies on the hydrogen bonding behaviors of water molecules in living cells will provide important clues to solve the complex nature of life.

Keywords: building blocks, biopolymers, polymerization, extraterrestrial inputs, mineral surfaces, metabolism, photosynthesis, water, hydrogen bonding (9: 3–10)

Continue reading “Geochemistry and the Origin of Life: From Extraterrestrial Processes, Chemical Evolution on Earth, Fossilized Life’s Records, to Natures of the Extant Life” »

Bioo uses microorganisms in the soil to power lights—and maybe one day, your whole house.

This is probably the only time, that I’ll be sharing a netflix trailer in this group. The documentary is worth watching, especially the outlook at the end.

In this unique feature documentary, titled David Attenborough: A Life On Our Planet, the celebrated naturalist reflects upon both the defining moments of his lifetime and the devastating changes he has seen. Coming to Netflix October 4 2020, the film addresses some of the biggest challenges facing life on our planet, providing a snapshot of global nature loss in a single lifetime. With it comes a powerful message of hope for future generations as Attenborough reveals the solutions to help save our planet from disaster.

Continue reading “David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet | Official Trailer | Netflix” »

SpaceX is expanding the beta test of its Starlink satellite internet service, reaching out via email on Monday to people who expressed interest in signing up for the service.

Called the “Better Than Nothing Beta” test, according to multiple screenshots of the email seen by CNBC, initial Starlink service is priced at $99 a month – plus a $499 upfront cost to order the Starlink Kit. That kit includes a user terminal to connect to the satellites, a mounting tripod and a wifi router. There is also now a Starlink app listed by SpaceX on the Google Play and Apple iOS app stores.

“As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations,” the emails said, signed Starlink Team. “Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mb/s to 150Mb/s and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.”