Lifeboat Foundation

I don’t think that star is the same after that one night stand.

When black holes swallow down massive amounts of matter from the space around them, they’re not exactly subtle about it. They belch out tremendous flares of X-rays, generated by the material heating to intense temperatures as it’s sucked towards the black hole, so bright we can detect them from Earth.

This is normal black hole behaviour. What isn’t normal is for those X-ray flares to spew forth with clockwork regularity, a puzzling behaviour reported in 2019 from a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy 250 million light-years away. Every nine hours, boom — X-ray flare.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Discovered a Star That Survived Being Swallowed by a Black Hole” »

Exploring new approaches to improve the capabilities and accuracy of robots, a team of researchers in Singapore has turned to an unexpected source: plants.

Robots have been dispatched to move cars, lift weighty inventory in warehouses and assist in construction projects.

But what if you need to delicately lift a tiny object 1/50th of an inch?

Australian scientists have discovered a new way to analyze microscopic cells, tissues and other transparent specimens, through the improvement of an almost 100-year-old imaging technique.

La Trobe University researchers have led a four-year collaboration to make “the invisible visible” by using custom-designed nanomaterials to enhance the sensitivity of phase contrast microscopy, an imaging technique commonly used by scientists to study biological specimens.

The discovery, detailed in Nature Photonics, will benefit a broad range of researchers and has the potential to advance research into the understanding and detection of disease.

In recent years, countless computer scientists worldwide have been developing deep neural network-based models that can predict people’s emotions based on their facial expressions. Most of the models developed so far, however, merely detect primary emotional states such as anger, happiness and sadness, rather than more subtle aspects of human emotion.

Past psychology research, on the other hand, has delineated numerous dimensions of emotion, for instance, introducing measures such as valence (i.e., how positive an emotional display is) and arousal (i.e., how calm or excited someone is while expressing an emotion). While estimating valence and arousal simply by looking at people’s faces is easy for most humans, it can be challenging for machines.

Continue reading “A technique to estimate emotional valence and arousal” »

On Tuesday, SpaceX plans to launch the latest prototype of its Starship spacecraft — a system that could one day carry humans to Mars. The prototype, called.

The first time SpaceX attempted such an ambitious Starship flight, the 16-story vehicle blew up. Seven weeks later, Elon Musk’s company is trying again.

Continue reading “SpaceX may finally launch its newest Starship rocket prototype Tuesday afternoon. With any luck, it won’t explode” »

A new paper suggests that the mysterious X17 subatomic particle is indicative of a fifth force of nature.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but in September last year a physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, said he has worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

A tiny implant offers a new weight loss option, and a gastric bypass alternative, for people suffering from obesity.

The device uses light to stimulate the nerve responsible for regulating food intake. A tiny glow from the implant and users don’t feel as hungry — instead, they feel full.

Researchers at Texas A&M say that this dime-sized device could provide a far less invasive surgical option than the so-called stomach stapling surgery — which is currently a last resort surgery for obese patients. This could be a viable option for a gastric bypass alternative.

Automation ‘to keep people safe’

Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics said four models, including Sophia will start to be mass produced in the first half of 2021.

Continue reading “Sophia Robot Makers’ Mass Rollout Plan Signals Rise in Robotics” »