Lifeboat Foundation

Physicists from Lancaster University have established why objects moving through superfluid helium-3 lack a speed limit in a continuation of earlier Lancaster research.

Helium-3 is a rare isotope of helium, in which one neutron is missing. It becomes superfluid at extremely low temperatures, enabling unusual properties such as a lack of friction for moving objects.

It was thought that the speed of objects moving through superfluid helium-3 was fundamentally limited to the critical Landau velocity, and that exceeding this speed limit would destroy the superfluid. Prior experiments in Lancaster have found that it is not a strict rule and objects can move at much greater speeds without destroying the fragile superfluid state.

PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (KRDO) – The North American Aerospace Defense Command says it is conducting air defense operations between September 20 and 23 in response to recent sightings of Russian aircraft.

Officials say they are doing the operations to “demonstrate NORAD’s air capability, readiness and will to defend the United States and Canada from competitors who continue to test our defenses.”

The organization says Russian aircraft were identified Friday evening within 50 nautical miles of Alaska’s Nunavik Island.

China has warned the US after it flew its ‘spy planes’ over the South China Sea several times electronically disguising as a civilian airplane.

“It is the old trick of the US military to use a transponder code to impersonate civil aircraft of other countries,” said Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Wenbin, during his briefing.

Narendra Modi Second Indian Prime Minister To Win Ig Nobel Prize 2020

RS: The third world war is at our gate, and it will be about water, if we don’t do something about this crisis. These walks are to raise awareness—this year we covered 17 countries, and in nine of them there were displaced people. So many people in the Middle East and African countries are moving to places like Europe, in part because of water scarcity—after forced migration comes, tension, conflict, and terrorism. Where terrorism is active, there is usually a scarcity of water. Look at Syria—a long time ago, it had very good agriculture, but then Turkey built a dam that changed things. It’s a similar story with Libya. If we want a safe future, we need to start conserving water.

What role can regulation play in conservation? Do you think privatizing water is a good way to promote its efficient use?

RS: If we really think about legal changes, we have to first think about river rights, or the rights of nature, and only then about water rights for humans. This type of thinking doesn’t exist today but we need this kind of legal framework that assures that the land of the river is only for the river, that the flow of the river is kept clean, and that the river has greenery on both banks to prevent erosion and silting. Only with all these factors can we ensure that rivers are healthy and only then that we are healthy.

Resting on the tail of the Great Bear in the constellation of Ursa Major, lies NGC 5585, a spiral galaxy that is more than it appears.

The many stars, and dust and gas clouds that make up NGC 5585, shown here in this Hubble image, contribute only a small fraction of the total mass of the galaxy. As in many galaxies, this discrepancy can be explained by the abundant yet seemingly invisible presence of dark matter.

Continue reading “Dark Matter Surplus Captured by Hubble” »

Disc is left with warped and tilted rings.

The young triple star system GW Orionis appears to be surrounded by a ring of gas and dust that has torn away and become misaligned with the rest of the system’s circumstellar disc. That is the conclusion of an international team of astronomers led by Stefan Kraus at the University of Exeter – who combined observations with numerical simulations to identify disc structures that have been confined to theory until now.

Astronomers believe that most stars are born with one or more companions, which interact in complex ways with the disc of planet-forming gas and dust surrounding the stellar system. If this disc is misaligned with the orbital planes of the host stars, previous simulations have predicted that it will warp and tear under their gravitational torque, forming distinct rings in separate planes from the rest of the disc. So far, however, astronomers have yet to identify this tearing in their observations of misaligned discs.

Continue reading “Planet-forming disc is torn apart in triple star system” »

Outdoor diners are enjoying their meals in enclosed space bubbles set up at Upper West Side French restaurant Cafe du Soleil.

Here’s one way to enjoy outdoor dining well into October, as well as on rainy nights.

Another video shows diners enjoying live jazz in their bubbles on a recent rainy night.

We recently observed the strongest magnetic field ever recorded in the Universe. The record-breaking field was discovered at the surface of a neutron star called GRO J1008-57 with a magnetic field strength of approximately 1 BILLION Tesla. For comparison, the Earth’s magnetic field clocks in at about 1/20,000 of a Tesla – tens of trillions of times weaker than you’d experience on this neutron star…and that is a good thing for your general health and wellbeing.

Neutron stars are the “dead cores” of once massive stars which have ended their lives as supernova. These stars exhausted their supply of hydrogen fuel in their core and a power balance between the internal energy of the star surging outward, and the star’s own massive gravity crushing inward, is cataclysmically unbalanced – gravity wins. The star collapses in on itself. The outer layers fall onto the core crushing it into the densest object we know of in the Universe – a neutron star. Even atoms are crushed. Negatively charged electrons are forced into the atomic nuclei meeting their positive proton counterparts creating more neutrons. When the core can be crushed no further, the outer remaining material of the star rebounds back into space in a massive explosion – a supernova.

Kontrol Energy Corporation, a Canadian public Company, has launched BioCloud – an unobtrusive, wall-mounted technology which detects the presence of COVID-19 in the air. This can trigger an alert system giving real time notifications of the pathogen’s presence to facility managers, allowing outbreaks to be contained before they occur.

This represents a game changer in the fight against COVID-19, according to Kontrol. Immediate applications include schools, hospitals, long term care facilities and mass transit vehicles such as planes, trains and buses.

“There is a critical need for technology that can provide us with assurances that the workplaces, schools, healthcare environments and other spaces we physically occupy are safe and free of infectious disease. Today, we have that in BioCloud,” said Paul Ghezzi, Chief Executive Officer of Kontrol. “Our team has been working day and night since the onset of the pandemic to bring this exciting technology to market. It will be an invaluable tool to enhance the existing system of individual testing and contact tracing.”