Lifeboat Foundation

Lunar lander developer Intuitive Machines has signed a contract with SpaceX for its first mission to the moon. The company announced this week that a Falcon 9 will launch its Nova-C lander in 2021 as part of a rideshare mission, but terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company won a contract from NASA in May to carry five payloads to the moon on that mission as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. Separately, a federal appeals court this week upheld a verdict in favor of the company in a suit against Moon Express, another commercial lunar lander company. That suit, involving work disputes between the companies, led to Intuitive Machines receiving $4.1 million in cash and stock. [SpaceNews]

Maxar Technologies awarded a contract to Deployable Space Systems to manufacture flexible solar arrays for the first element of NASA’s lunar Gateway. The contract this week is for a pair of Roll Out Solar Array solar panels, each capable of producing 32.5 kilowatts of power. The arrays will be used on the Power and Propulsion Element that Maxar is building for NASA that will serve as the foundation for the Gateway in orbit around the moon. [SpaceNews]

A startup planning propellant depots in orbit for refueling satellites has raised $3 million. OrbitFab announced Thursday it raised the seed round of funding from venture capital fund Type 1 Ventures, Techstars and others. The company is working on technology to allow for refueling of satellites using small depots in orbit, and recently tested that technology on the International Space Station. At a conference in Washington earlier in the week, the company said it was still working on raising a funding round but hopes to have its first tanker in orbit by the end of next year. [TechCrunch].

MANILA, Philippines — Now in its 8th year, Space Apps is an international hackathon for coders, scientists, designers, storytellers, makers, builders, technologists, and others in cities around the world, where teams engage with NASA’s free and open data to address real-world problems on Earth and in space. Space Apps 2018 included over 18,000 participants at more than 200 events in 75 countries.

Since its inception in 2012, NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge has become the world’s largest global hackathon, engaging thousands of citizens across the globe to use NASA’s open data to build innovative solutions to challenges we face on Earth and in space.

The NASA International Space Apps Challenge (or Space Apps) is an international hackathon that will take place over a 48-hour period in cities around the globe between October 18 and 20, 2019. The event embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing open-source solutions to challenges we currently face on Earth and in space.

In the Philippines, it is the fourth time for this event to take place again in Manila on October 18 to 20, 2019. “I am thrilled and excited to continue the tradition of inviting students and professionals, beginners and veterans from the Philippines to join this prestigious global hackathon by NASA,” software developer Michael Lance M. Domagas said, who is currently leading the hackathon since 2016. “In fact, a Pinoy team winning globally last year makes Filipinos inspired to use these technologies in helping the society we live in, especially now that a law has been passed creating the Philippine Space Agency,” he added.

The Pinoy winning team who developed an app seeking to use scientific data to benefit fishermen, even without Internet connection, is being incubated at Animo Labs, the technology business incubator of De La Salle University in partnership with DOST-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development. “Animo Labs looks forward to see these kinds of projects being developed by Filipinos with the help of NASA data and resources, and we are happy to host it again at De La Salle University,” Animo Labs Executive Director Mr. Federico C. Gonzalez said.

According to condensed matter physics predictions, at a high enough pressure, hydrogen should dissociate and transform into an atomic metal. However, the exact pressure range at which this occurs has not yet been ascertained, and the process through which hydrogen becomes a metal is still somewhat unclear.

In a recent study, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry demonstrated that at a pressure of 350–360 GPa and at temperatures below 200K, molecular hydrogen starts to conduct and becomes semimetallic. Their paper, published in Nature Physics, provides interesting new insight about the transition of hydrogen at high pressures, unveiling some of the properties it acquires.

“Typically, metallic hydrogen is considered to be atomic hydrogen—a crystal built from protons after dissociation of the molecules,” Mikhail Eremets, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “However, hydrogen can also transform into a metal in the molecular state—in this case, electronic bands of molecular hydrogen crystal broaden and eventually overlap so that the band gap closes, free electrons and holes appear—this is metallic state.”

Using a new time-based method to control light from an ultrafast laser, researchers have developed a nanoscale 3D printing technique that can fabricate tiny structures 1000 times faster than conventional two-photon lithography (TPL) techniques, without sacrificing resolution.

Despite the high throughput, the new parallelized technique—known as femtosecond projection TPL (FP-TPL)—produces depth resolution of 175 nanometers, which is better than established methods and can fabricate structures with 90-degree overhangs that can’t currently be made. The technique could lead to manufacturing-scale production of bioscaffolds, flexible electronics, electrochemical interfaces, micro-optics, mechanical and optical metamaterials, and other functional micro- and nanostructures.

The work, reported Oct. 3 in the journal Science, was done by researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Sourabh Saha, the paper’s lead and corresponding author, is now an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Space bacteria — they’re tiny, invisible, and potentially harmful; even if no one is sure that they actually exist. But for most of the Space Age, NASA and other agencies have treated the possibility of pathogens from space carefully, both during our exploration of other worlds and because of the havoc they could conceivably wreak on Earth. Nowadays, though, there’s a new factor: Elon Musk.

The billionaire entrepreneur dreams of settling thousands of humans on the planet Mars and, oh yeah, he happens to own a rocket company that is slowly building the capability to do so. Musk and other leaders in the commercial space industry are looking at opening up previously unexplored possibilities — asteroid mining, private space stations, package delivery to the moon’s surface. Laudable as these goals are, they are also forcing governments around the world to rethink their space regulations and consider whether they’re up to these impending challenges.

As ever more players enter the space arena it’s time to make sure that everybody is following the best planetary protection practices. Exploring the universe should happen for the benefit of all, including future generations.

Stuart Russell’s latest book examines how artificial intelligence could spin out of control. David Leslie critiques it.

A new study is the first to report evidence that nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) like aspirin may lessen the adverse effects of air pollution exposure on lung function. The team of researchers from the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Boston University School of Medicine published their findings in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

The researchers analyzed a subset of data collected from a cohort of 2,280 male veterans from the greater Boston area who were given tests to determine their lung function. The average age of participants was 73 years. The researchers examined the relationship between test results, self-reported NSAID use, and ambient particulate matter (PM) and black carbon in the month preceding the test, while accounting for a variety of factors, including the health status of the subject and whether or not he was a smoker. They found that the use of any NSAID nearly halved of the effect of PM on lung function, with the association consistent across all four weekly air pollution measurements from same-day to 28 days prior to the lung function test.

Because most of the people in the study cohort who took NSAIDs used aspirin, the researchers say the modifying effect they observed was mainly from aspirin, but add that effects of non-aspirin NSAIDs are worthy of further exploration. While the mechanism is unknown, the researchers speculate that NSAIDs mitigate inflammation brought about by air pollution.

A year old, and this video is titled with the “I-word”. But a very interesting talk.

It’s not every day that I get to post a video where I feel like I’m involved with something that may seriously improve and extend lives. I’m so grateful that somehow, I was brought into this process.

Continue reading “Immortality by 2029” »

For the first time ever, physicists tested the phenomenon of quantum superposition using molecules. That’s a big deal.