Lifeboat Foundation

Two bits of discarded Russian and Chinese space hardware may pass within less than 25m of each other.

O,.o wut!

Analysis at Dutch university suggests researchers are not reporting a large number of animal experiments.

Experts say that COVID-19 almost certainly arose naturally, rather than being bioengineered.

But that doesn’t mean the next pandemic won’t involve a deadly virus designed by an adversary, as distinguished fellow at Harvard Law Vivek Wadhwa argues in a new essay for Foreign Policy.

“It is now too late to stop the global spread of these technologies — the genie is out of the bottle,” he wrote. “We must treat the coronavirus pandemic as a full dress rehearsal of what is to come — unfortunately, that includes not only viruses that erupt from nature, but also those that will be deliberately engineered by humans.”

Looks like we have a real lightsaber now.

James Hobson’s lightsaber is not a toy.

Continue reading “Canadian YouTubers engineer hyper-realistic plasma lightsaber that can cut through steel” »

After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem.

The company aims to raise NOK100 million by going public. It will use the funds to expand its overseas operation and reinforce engineering resources in Norway.

Norwegian floating PV specialist Ocean Sun is seeking a listing on the Merkur Market, a multilateral trading facility which has offered small and medium-sized companies access to the Oslo Stock Exchange since 2016.

The company aims to raise NOK100 million ($10.9 million) through the initial public offering. “The funding round is necessary in order for Ocean Sun to expand its operation abroad but also to reinforce local engineering resources in Norway,” Ocean Sun CEO Børge Bjørneklett told pv magazine. “We are involved in several demonstration projects but since they are relatively small we don’t make sufficient revenue yet and we need external financing to progress faster and stronger.”

Continue reading “Norwegian floating PV specialist Ocean Sun plans IPO” »

2016 gave us a fair number of false SETI detections. But lets imagine that this year it’s the year.

Maybe it’s first detected at a radio telescope in Russia, or perhaps an optical telescope in California. But in 2017, somewhere someone picks up a signal. Skeptical astronomers alert their colleagues, yet sure enough, they’re reading it out in telescopes around the world. It’s too specific or too weird to be a known natural phenomenon, and it repeats itself with suspiciously high fidelity over some interval. Cautiously, but excitedly, the news gets out. We’ve received a message from the stars.

It’s worth wondering: what would happen next?

Light is incredible. You can bend it, you can bounce it, and researchers have now found a way to trap light, physically move it, and then release it again.

This incredible feat of physics was demonstrated at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and published in Physics Review Letters. Researchers trapped light in a quantum memory, a cloud of ultra-cold rubidium atoms. The quantum memory was then moved 1.2 millimeters and the light was released with little impact on its properties.

“We stored the light by putting it in a suitcase so to speak, only that in our case the suitcase was made of a cloud of cold atoms. We moved this suitcase over a short distance and then took the light out again. This is very interesting not only for physics in general, but also for quantum communication because light is not very easy to ‘capture’, and if you want to transport it elsewhere in a controlled manner, it usually ends up being lost,” senior author Professor Patrick Windpassinger said in a statement.

Today, the Moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story.

New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the Moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly after the Moon formed, and when volcanic activity was at its highest.

The key to it all is heat and lots of energy. The Moon formed after a collision between Earth and a proto-planet astronomers call Theia. And just after the smash up, there was lots of water vapor — enough that the Moon could’ve had a fairly substantial atmosphere and pools of water on the ground. Volcanic activity was also high, which could have replenished the atmosphere with water vapor from deep in the interior.