Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

One emergent company, Virgin Orbit wants to switch from a fuel-burning upper stage to solar energy, a move that could support future human habitats on other planets.

The satellite launch company has made a name for itself with its visually striking rocket launches. Strapped to the wing of a Boeing 747 the LauncherOne rocket doesn’t need the same launch pads and infrastructure as its competitors.

Virgin Orbit has hosted two successful launches to orbit, but it’s not stopping there. CEO Dan Hart tells Inverse that “we’re developing a solar electric upper stage for our rocket right now.”

Read more | >

Nuclear power is going portable in the form of relatively lightweight, cost-effective microreactors. A team of former SpaceX engineers is developing the “world’s first portable, zero-emissions power source” that can bring power to remote areas and also allows for quick installation of new units in populated areas, a press statement revealed.

Last year, the team secured $1.2 million in funding from angel investors for their startup Radiant to help develop its portable nuclear microreactors, which are aimed at both commercial and military applications.

Read more | >

Researchers at Delft University of Technology have found a new way to cool radio waves all the way down to their quantum ground state. To do so, they used circuits that employ an analog of the so-called laser cooling technique that is frequently used to cool atomic samples. The device used a recently developed technique the researchers call photon pressure coupling, which is predicted to be of use in detecting ultra-weak magnetic resonance (MRI) signals or for quantum-sensing applications that can help the search for dark matter. The results have been published in Science Advances.

The radio waves we usually encounter in our daily lives, such as those that we listen to in our car or those that send signals to our baby monitors in our house, are hot: they contain noise that comes from the random motion of the in the things they are emitted from and even in the antenna you are using to listen to them. This is one of the reasons why you hear static when you tune the radio in your car to a frequency that has no .

Read more | >

Good telescope that I’ve used to learn the basics: https://amzn.to/35r1jAk.
Get a Wonderful Person shirt: https://teespring.com/stores/whatdamath.
Alternatively, PayPal donations can be sent here: http://paypal.me/whatdamath.

Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about a new simulation showing that we could use nuclear weapons to protect the planet from certain types of dangerous asteroids.
Links:
https://www.llnl.gov/news/late-time-small-body-disruptions-can-protect-earth.
https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/spheral.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576521003921
https://dart.jhuapl.edu/

Support this channel on Patreon to help me make this a full time job:
https://www.patreon.com/whatdamath.

Bitcoin/Ethereum to spare? Donate them here to help this channel grow!

Continue reading “Turns Out, There Is a Way to Nuke a Dangerous Asteroid As a Last Resort” | >

Witness first-hand how your mountain of waste plastic expands over the years and what impact your food has on the rainforests. Virtual reality gives you a front-row seat to the impact of unsustainable behavior. Communication scientists Marijn Meijers and Hande Sungur have developed highly effective virtual worlds that give people an up-close and personal experience of how sustainable and unsustainable conduct make a substantial difference…

You walk around a supermarket and whenever you take a product from the shelves, a pop-up appears with information about the environmental impact of your choice, for example, clearcutting of tropical rainforest to cultivate the palm oil in your chocolate spread. You travel through time to see how much plastic waste your everyday products create in the future, and travel back to see how your mountain of waste shrinks when you make more sustainable decisions.

VR is shown to have a positive effect on sustainability.

The first findings from Meijers and Sungur’s projects are in and the results are positive. “Research into the VR supermarket shows it gets the message across more effectively and gives people the feeling that they have control over the problem,” says Meijers. “They clearly see how buying eco-friendly products contribute to a more sustainable world and that unsustainable choices have a negative effect. This positive effect on the participants’ behavior continued to be reflected in their real-world shopping habits after two weeks.”

Continue reading “Virtual reality: A front-row seat to the impact of (un)sustainable behavior” | >

Deepfake videos are well-known; many examples of what only appear to be celebrities can be seen regularly on YouTube. But while such videos have grown lifelike and convincing, one area where they fail is in reproducing a person’s voice. In this new effort, the team at UoC found evidence that the technology has advanced. They tested two of the most well-known voice copying algorithms against both human and voice recognition devices and found that the algorithms have improved to the point that they are now able to fool both.

The two algorithms— SV2TTS and AutoVC —were tested by obtaining samples of voice recordings from publicly available databases. Both systems were trained using 90 five-minute voice snippets of people talking. They also enlisted the assistance of 14 volunteers who provided voice samples and access to their voice recognition devices. The researchers then tested the two systems using the open-source software Resemblyzer—it listens and compares voice recordings and then gives a rating based on the similar two samples are. They also tested the algorithms by using them to attempt to access services on voice recognition devices.

The researchers found the algorithms were able to fool the Resemblyzer nearly half of the time. They also found that they were able to fool Azure (Microsoft’s cloud computing service) approximately 30 percent of the time. And they were able to fool Amazon’s Alexa voice recognition system approximately 62% of the time.

Read more | >

The four astronauts set to blast off Oct. 30 to the International Space Station visited Cape Canaveral over the weekend for a test run inside SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft, one of the last training events before they return to Florida on launch week.

Commander Raja Chari, a U.S. Air Force colonel, leads NASA’s Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station. Chari and the mission’s other three astronauts visited Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Saturday for the Crew Equipment Interface Test, a customary pre-flight training event officials equate to a “test drive” or “walk through” of the spacecraft.

The four-person crew will launch on the third NASA crew rotation flight to the space station, and the fifth human flight on a Crew Dragon spacecraft overall, including a 2020 test flight and the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission last month.

Read more | >