Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers from the Dutch Delft University of Technology and NASA/ESA recommend that we build a Mars base with the use of bacteria. In short, the idea is to send a spacecraft containing bacteria to Mars several years ahead of sending human settlers. Those bacteria can then start mining for iron that will later be used by human pioneers when building settlements.

Benjamin Lehner, a Ph.D. student from the Delft University of Technology, mapped out a complete plan to adequately prepare for human settlers. He proposes to send an initial capsule containing a bioreactor, an uncomplicated rover that is capable of digging, and a 3D printer. The reactor will be filled with a type of bacteria called ‘Shewanella oneidensis’ that can convert the non-usable naturally occurring iron in the Martian soil to usable magnetite that is easy to extract. This magnetite can then be converted to components like iron plates with the 3D printer.

Princeton researchers have uncovered new rules governing how objects absorb and emit light, fine-tuning scientists’ control over light and boosting research into next-generation solar and optical devices.

The discovery solves a longstanding problem of scale, where light’s behavior when interacting with tiny objects violates well-established physical constraints observed at larger scales.

“The kinds of effects you get for very small objects are different from the effects you get from very large objects,” said Sean Molesky, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical engineering and the study’s first author. The difference can be observed in moving from a molecule to a grain of sand. “You can’t simultaneously describe both things,” he said.

The Mars 2020 rover, which sets off for the Red Planet next year, will not only search for traces of ancient life, but pave the way for future human missions, NASA scientists said Friday as they unveiled the vehicle.

The rover has been constructed in a large, sterile room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, near Los Angeles, where its driving equipment was given its first successful test last week.

Shown to invited journalists on Friday, it is scheduled to leave Earth in July 2020 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, becoming the fifth US rover to land on Mars seven months later in February.

The researchers wanted to know how tardigrades protected themselves against such harsh conditions. So Kunieda and his colleagues began by sequencing the genome of Ramazzottius varieornatus, a species that is particularly stress tolerant. It’s easier to study processes within the tardigrade’s cells when the animal’s genome is inserted into mammalian cells, says Kunieda. So researchers manipulated cultures of human cells to produce pieces of the water bear’s inner machinery to determine which parts were actually giving the animals their resistance.

Eventually, Kunieda and his colleagues discovered that a protein known as Dsup prevented the animal’s DNA from breaking under the stress of radiation and desiccation. And they also found that the tardigrade-tinged human cells were able to suppress X-ray induced damage by about 40%.

“Protection and repair of DNA is a fundamental component of all cells and a central aspect in many human diseases, including cancer and ageing,” says Ingemar Jönsson, an evolutionary ecologist who studies tardigrades at Kristianstad University in Sweden.

(CNN) — Scientists are puzzled by the behavior of what used to be one of the brightest stars in the skies.

The red giant star – called Betelgeuse (bey-tel-juice) – has been rapidly dimming since October.

It used to be the ninth-brightest object you can see from Earth, but it’s now more than two times fainter than usual.

Would be cool to see Tesla use more recycled components.

McDonald’s used to send 62 million pounds of coffee chaff to landfills. But the company partnered with Ford Motor Company with hopes to eliminate their waste to landfills. The research team at Ford has already been using agave, wheat, and even denim byproducts to make car parts. They discovered that chaff can be used as well. Here’s an inside look of the process.

Continue reading “How Ford Makes Car Parts From Used McDonald’s Coffee Beans” »

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite ( TESS ) has discovered a world between the sizes of Mars and Earth orbiting a bright, cool, nearby star. The planet, called L 98-59b, marks the tiniest discovered by TESS to date.

It’s no secret that the average smart phone today packs an abundance of gadgets fitting in your pocket, which could have easily filled a car trunk a few decades ago. We like to think about video cameras, music playing equipment, and maybe even telephones here, but let’s not ignore the amount of measurement equipment we also carry around in form of tiny sensors nowadays. How to use those sensors for educational purposes to teach physics is presented in [Sebastian Staacks]’ talk at 36C3 about the phyphox mobile lab app.

While accessing a mobile device’s sensor data is usually quite straightforwardly done through some API calls, the phyphox app is not only a shortcut to nicely graph all the available sensor data on the screen, it also exports the data for additional visualization and processing later on. An accompanying experiment editor allows to define custom experiments from data capture to analysis that are stored in an XML-based file format and possible to share through QR codes.

Continue reading “36C3: Phyphox – Using Smartphone Sensors For Physics Experiments” »

Russian astrophysicists propose the Casimir Effect causes the Universe’s expansion to accelerate.