Lifeboat Foundation

The end of the space shuttle program concluded an era that began almost a half century earlier with the first free flight of a wingless lifting body.

In the coming years, NASA’s Project Artemis will send astronauts to the Moon for the first time in fifty years. In the years that follow, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) also hope to build a spiritual successor to the ISS – the international lunar village around the Moon’s southern pole.

With multiple space agencies looking to build bases and private aerospace companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin hoping to make lunar tourism a reality, the message is clear: We’re going back to the Moon. And this time, we plan on staying!

Continue reading “Are We Going to Colonize the Moon?” »

“The process of creating methane-based fuel has been theorized before, initially by Elon Musk and Space X. It utilized a solar infrastructure to generate electricity, resulting in the electrolysis of carbon dioxide, which, when mixed with water from the ice found on Mars, produces methane. This process, known as the Sabatier process, is used on the International Space Station to produce breathable oxygen from water. One of the main issues with the Sabatier process is that it is a two-stage procedure requiring large faculties to operate efficiently. The method developed by Xin and his team will use anatomically dispersed zinc to act as a synthetic enzyme, catalyzing the carbon dioxide and initializing the process. This will require much less space and can efficiently produce methane using materials and under conditions similar to those found on the surface of Mars.”

Among the many challenges with a Mars voyage, one of the most pressing is: How can you get enough fuel for the spacecraft to fly back to Earth?

Houlin Xin, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, may have found a solution.

Continue reading “Making methane on Mars” »

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, or CNMS, contributed to a groundbreaking experiment published in Science that tracks the real-time transport of individual molecules.

A team led by the University of Graz, Austria, used unique four-probe scanning tunneling microscopy, or STM, to move a single molecule between two independent probes and observe it disappear from one point and instantaneously reappear at the other.

The STM, made available via the CNMS user program, operates under an applied voltage, scanning material surfaces with a sharp probe that can move atoms and molecules by nudging them a few nanometers at a time. This instrument made it possible to send and receive dibromoterfluorene molecules 150 nanometers across a silver surface with unprecedented control.

“Klein tunnelling” has been observed directly for the first time.

A curious effect called “Klein tunnelling” has been observed for the first time in an experiment involving sound waves in a phononic crystal. As well as confirming the century-old prediction that relativistic particles (those travelling at speeds approaching the speed of light) can pass through an energy barrier with 100% transmission, the research done in China and the US could lead to better sonar and ultrasound imaging.

Quantum tunnelling refers to the ability of a particle to pass through a potential-energy barrier, despite having insufficient energy to cross if the system is described by classical physics. Tunnelling is a result of wave–particle duality in quantum mechanics, whereby the wave function of a particle extends into and beyond a barrier.

Continue reading “Relativistic quasiparticles tunnel through barrier with 100% transmission, verifying century-old prediction” »

Ultra-impulsive acoustic emission from a solar flare recently detected by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) indicated submersion of its source beneath the active region that hosted the flare.

The odd, wavy pattern that results from viewing certain phone or computer screens through polarized glasses has led researchers to take a step toward thinner, lighter-weight lenses. Called moiré, the pattern is made by laying one material with opaque and translucent parts at an angle over another material of similar contrast.

A team of researchers from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, TUAT, in Japan have demonstrated that moiré metalenses—tiny, patterned lenses composed of artificial ‘meta’ atoms—can tune focal length along a wider range than previously seen. They published their results on November 23 in Optics Express.

“Metalenses have attracted a lot of interest because they are so thin and lightweight, and could be used in ultra-compact imaging systems, like future smart phones, virtual reality goggles, drones or microbots,” said paper author Kentaro Iwami, associate professor in the TUAT Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering.

After the tweet by David Sinclair just recently regarding a study looking at dietary restriction and the circadian clock, and the way it may impact longevity and health, I decided to have a bit of a deeper look.

Join me as I dive a little deeper, and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to keep up with all the latest releases.

Continue reading “Zeitgeber Circadian Rhythm” »

Third party data collection — whatever the motivation — has the potential to blur the lines between data privacy and complete identification.

By Shireen Gupta

In March 2020, it was revealed that the Zoom iOS app was sending user data to Facebook unbeknownst to the user. The transaction conspired in a manner where Zoom had implemented the ‘login from Facebook’ button on its iOS app, subsequently involving the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK) in its iOS platform. The implementation of this feature allowed Facebook to access and extract users’ data from Zoom’s platform. Zoom apologised for this incident, claiming that it did not know of such implications while developing the app, further stating that it had rectified its mistake and fixed the app to remove the Facebook SDK.