Lifeboat Foundation

Space exploration company SpaceX’s founder and chief executive officer Elon Musk on Tuesday said he expected humans to land on Mars in six years. He also said that SpaceX plans to launch an unmanned spacecraft and land on Mars in two years, with a chance of the first human landing on Mars in four years instead of six.

United States’ space agency NASA’s Perseverance rover which was launched in July 2020 is scheduled to land at Jezero Crater on Mars on 18 February 2021. It will look at signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for a possible return to Earth.

It is carrying instruments that will use high-temperature electrolysis but the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE) will be producing oxygen only, from the carbon dioxide in the air.

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Here we go again.

The RC cars are designed by Frank Stephenson of BMW, McLaren, and Ferrari fame, and will blast off on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Lockdown — seen from space.

Almost as soon as the coronavirus pandemic began, experts started noticing that the global lockdown appeared to be resulting in a sharp drop in worldwide carbon emissions.

Continue reading “Here’s how lockdowns slashed global emissions, according to NASA” »

A step forward in space exploration for China and humankind and a colossal step backward for the US.

A thundering boom that rocked parts of upstate New York on Wednesday afternoon is now believed to have been caused by an unusually large meteor hurtling through Earth’s atmosphere.

A new type of energy-generating synthetic skin could create more affordable prosthetic limbs and robots capable of mimicking the sense of touch, scientists say.

In an early-view paper published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Robotics, researchers from the University of Glasgow describe how a robotic hand wrapped in their flexible solar skin is capable of interacting with objects without using dedicated and expensive touch sensors.

Continue reading “Energy-generating synthetic skin for affordable prosthetic limbs and touch-sensitive robots” »

In the 1950s, few things seemed more futuristic and utopian than harnessing nuclear energy to power your home. Towering nuclear reactors popped up across the U.S. with the promise of harvesting energy from smashed atoms of Uranium to power everything from lights in an office to an oven cooking a pot roast. With clean and efficient nuclear power, anything seemed possible.

But as the years went on, doubt about the safety of these reactors began to poison the bright future they’d once promised. Stories of nuclear waste polluting waterways downstream of power plants began to stir alarm, and in the 1980s the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion sent radiation billowing across Europe and into the tissues of an estimated 4,000 Ukrainians who died from radiation poisoning. Even as recently as 2011, Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant faced catastrophe when a tsunami knocked out its power supply and led all three of its nuclear reactors to melt down.

All in all, it’s been a tough few decades for nuclear energy’s public image. But nuclear scientists say that now, more than ever, is the time to reinvest in nuclear innovation. Governments agree: In the U.K. Rolls-Royce plans to roll out 16 mini-nuclear plants over the next five years and China, an emerging nuclear super power, has pledged to ramp up its nuclear use to meet emissions goals.

The fossil was a male Paranthropus robustus, a species that existed alongside our early human ancestors as a ‘cousin species’.

Academics from La Trobe University’s Archaeology Department in Melbourne, Australia led the excavation and reconstruction of the large-toothed rare skull from the Drimolen Main Quarry north of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Researchers described the fossil — that was found in 2018 on South African Father’s Day (June 20) — as exciting.