Lifeboat Foundation

The Solar System is positively lousy with magnetic fields. They drape around (most of) the planets and their moons, which interact with the system-wide magnetic field swirling out from the Sun.

Although invisible to the naked eye, these magnetic fields leave their marks behind. Earth’s crust is riddled with magnetic materials, for example, that retain a paleomagnetic record of the planet’s changing magnetic field. And meteorites, when we are lucky enough to find them, can tell us about the magnetic field in the environment they formed in, billions of years ago.

Most of the meteorites we study in this manner are from the asteroid belt, which sits between Mars and Jupiter. But astronomers from Japan have just developed a new means of probing the magnetic materials within meteorites from much, much farther away — and thus provided a new tool for understanding the outer reaches of the early Solar System.

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are involved in about 1,600 close encounters between two spacecraft in low Earth orbit every week. That’s about 50% of all such incidents. As the constellation grows, that proportion is expected to rise up to 90%, experts say.

Relive the best moments of CERN Alumni2018#firstcollisions with us as the excitement mounts for the next big reunion taking place from 1–3 October2021and sign up for #secondcollisions…

Tune in for inspiring talks, networking, virtual visits and much more!

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1,634 views • Aug 13 2021 • Christof Koch — Allen Institute for Brain Science, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation.

Let the record show that the current COVID-19 vaccines work, and they work well. But what is the next step in vaccine development, especially amid increasing rates of breakthrough infections and emergence of variants of concern?

In a new Northwestern Medicine study in mice, researchers took one of the current vaccines, which is based on the novel coronavirus’s infamous spike protein, and added a different antigen, the nucleocapsid protein, to form a new, potentially improved version of the COVID vaccine. The nucleocapsid protein, which is an internal RNA-binding protein, may help kick the immune system into high gear much more quickly than the spike protein is capable of since it is among the most rapidly and highly expressed proteins in coronaviruses.

“At this point, we’re just trying to figure out ‘What should the 2.0 vaccines be?’” said senior and corresponding study author Pablo Penaloza-MacMaster, an assistant professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It seems like adding nucleocapsid to the vaccine renders it more protective, relative to having only the spike.”

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Scientists at NASA have adjusted their forecast of an Empire State Building-sized asteroid it predicts could potentially smash into the planet.

The chances of the large rock hitting the Earth have increased. In a press conference Wednesday, NASA said there was a 1-in-1,750 chance the asteroid, Bennu, could smash into the Earth between now and 2300. It’s a higher chance than previously predicted at 1 in 2,700 chances.

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Close asteroid pass August 21 2021. This fast-moving asteroid is designed2016AJ193. It’s currently rushing inward toward the sun.

Aerospace giant Honeywell is teaming up with anti-jamming expert InfiniDome to develop a new drone sensor capable of enhancing GPS resiliency when signals are weak or experiencing blockages. The new tech, which is being designed for defense and commercial users alike, is expected to hit markets during the first semester of next year.

Drones being flown for all sorts of purposes rely on GPS signals for situational referencing and carrying out tasks assigned to particular locations. The importance of maintaining those feeds, therefore, has become critical to even the most ordinary operation. That dependability of GPS connectivity, however, can be compromised by surrounding structure density – like clusters of high rises, or flights below bridges – or complicated by the ever-proliferating number of craft in the skies at any given time.

US startup has combined radioactive isotopes from nuclear waste with ultra-slim layers of nanodiamond to create a battery that purportedly can 28,000 years, Tibi Puiu reported for ZME Science last week.