Lifeboat Foundation

Comet 67P/C-G is a dusty object. As it neared its closest approach to the Sun in late July and August 2015, instruments on Rosetta recorded a huge amount of dust enshrouding the comet.

This is tied to the comet’s proximity to our parent star, its heat causing the comet’s nucleus to release gases into space, lifting the dust along. Spectacular jets were also observed, blasting more dust away from the comet. This disturbed, ejected material forms the ‘coma’, the gaseous envelope encasing the comet’s nucleus, and can create a beautiful and distinctive tail.

A single image from Rosetta’s OSIRIS instrument can contain hundreds of dust particles and grains surrounding the 4 km-wide comet nucleus. Sometimes, even larger chunks of material left the surface of 67P/C-G — as shown here.

A plane without moving parts isn’t even the half of it.

SpaceX’s Starlink has showed its utility in connecting far-flung locations to the internet quickly and relatively simply in Washington, where like much of the west coast wildfires have caused enormous damage to rural areas. A couple small towns in the state have received Starlink connections to help locals and emergency workers.

The town of Malden was almost completely destroyed, but restoration efforts are underway, and of course it helps to be able to access the internet for communicating with residents and authorities. With power and cellular service unreliable, satellite internet is a good temporary option, and Starlink stepped up.

As SpaceX founder Elon Musk said on Twitter, the company is prioritizing emergency responders and areas without internet:

In a study of gorilla skeletons collected in the wild, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers and their international collaborators report that aging female gorillas do not experience the accelerated bone loss associated with the bone-weakening condition called osteoporosis, as their human counterparts often do. The findings, they say, could offer clues as to how humans evolved with age-related diseases.

The study was published on Sept. 21, 2020, in Philosophical Translations of the Royal Society B.

“Osteoporosis in humans is a really interesting mechanical problem,” says Christopher Ruff, Ph.D., professor at the Center for Functional Anatomy and Evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “In terms of natural selection, there is no evolutionary advantage in developing bone loss with aging to the point of a potential fracture. By looking at close relatives of humans on the evolutionary tree, we can infer more about the origins of this condition.”

The number of mutations that can contribute to aging may be significantly higher than previously believed, according to new research on fruit flies. The study by scientists at Linköping University, Sweden, supports a new theory about the type of mutation that can lie behind aging. The results have been published in BMC Biology.

We live, we age and we die. Many functions of our bodies deteriorate slowly but surely as we age, and eventually an organism dies. This thought may not be very encouraging, but most of us have probably accepted that this is the fate of all living creatures—death is part of life. However, those who study evolutionary biology find it far from clear why this is the case.

“The evolution of aging is, in a manner of speaking, a paradox. Evolution causes continuous adaptation in organisms, but even so it has not resulted in them ceasing to age,” says Urban Friberg, senior lecturer in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology at Linköping University and leader of the study.

DroneUp and NATO Allied Command Transformation performed an experiment to prove a new and innovative way of resupplying soldiers on the battlefield. The experiment proved that autonomous drone delivery works.

Continue reading “NATO’s Autonomous Drone Delivery Experiment Works” »

Digital transformations have become a global trend in recent years. To be clear, in mainstream understanding, the term means to increase the use of data, which can then help us to build “smarter” machines, predict the future, dig out insights, eliminate human errors and maximize efficiency. However, according to the stats released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and McKinsey & Company, only about 30% of digital transformation projects ended up successfully. The result keeps us wondering: What are the key issues to account for such high failure rate? And more importantly, how can we resolve these issues?

Liquid water is vital for biology, so the finding will be of interest to researchers studying the potential for life elsewhere in the Solar System.

The underground lakes were detected in the Red Planet’s south polar region.

SpaceX Crew-1 Commander Mike Hopkins names the Crew Dragon capsule, that will launch him and three astronauts to the station, Resilience in honor of teams supporting the NASA Commercial Crew Program mission during 2020.