Lifeboat Foundation

Ookla tests aren’t showing the gigabit speeds SpaceX teased, but it’s early.

The end of the universe as we know it will not come with a bang. Most stars will slowly fizzle as their temperatures fade to zero.

“It will be a bit of a sad, lonely, cold place,” said theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, who added no one will be around to witness this long farewell happening in the far far future. Most believe all will be dark as the universe comes to an end. “It’s known as ‘heat death,’ where the universe will be mostly black holes and burned-out stars,” said Caplan, who imagined a slightly different picture when he calculated how some of these dead stars might change over the eons.

Punctuating the darkness could be silent fireworks—explosions of the remnants of stars that were never supposed to explode. New theoretical work by Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University, finds that many white dwarfs may explode in supernova in the distant far future, long after everything else in the universe has died and gone quiet.

Observations of dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way have yielded simultaneous constraints on three popular theories of dark matter.

A team of scientists led by cosmologists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC and Fermi national accelerator laboratories has placed some of the tightest constraints yet on the nature of dark matter, drawing on a collection of several dozen small, faint satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way to determine what kinds of dark matter could have led to the population of galaxies we see today.

The new study is significant not just for how tightly it can constrain dark matter, but also for what it can constrain, said Risa Wechsler, director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at SLAC and Stanford University. “One of the things that I think is really exciting is that we are actually able to start probing three of the most popular theories of dark matter, all at the same time,” she said.

Aalto University researchers have developed a black silicon photodetector that has reached above 130% efficiency. Thus, for the first time, a photovoltaic device has exceeded the 100% limit, which has earlier been considered as the theoretical maximum for external quantum efficiency.

“When we saw the results, we could hardly believe our eyes. Straight away we wanted to verify the results by independent measurements,” says Prof. Hele Savin, head of the Electron Physics research group at Aalto University.

The independent measurements were carried out by the German National Metrology Institute, Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), which is known to provide the most accurate and reliable measurement services in Europe.

The Vatican and the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong have been the targets of alleged Chinese state-backed hackers, it has emerged, just weeks before talks intended to improve relations between the two sides.

According to the U.S.-based cyber attack monitoring group Recorded Future, RedDelta, allegedly backed by the Chinese state, began attacking the Vatican in May ahead of upcoming talks in September to renew a landmark 2018 deal that helped thaw diplomatic relations.

Recorded Future said that the Hong Kong Study Mission to China — a key link between the Vatican and China — and the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions also were targeted.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Chinese government-linked hackers targeted biotech company Moderna Inc, a U.S.-based coronavirus vaccine research developer, this year in a bid to steal data, according to a U.S. security official tracking Chinese hacking.

China on Friday rejected the accusation that hackers linked to it had targeted Moderna.

Last week, the U.S. Justice Department made public an indictment of two Chinese nationals accused of spying on the United States, including three unnamed U.S.-based targets involved in medical research to fight the novel coronavirus.

Antibiotic resistance is an increasing health problem, but new research suggests it is not only caused by the overuse of antibiotics. It’s also caused by pollution.

Using a process known as genomic analysis, University of Georgia scientists found a strong correlation between antibiotic resistance and heavy metal contamination in an environment.

Jesse C. Thomas IV, an alumnus of the College of Public Health and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, found commonalities in soils contaminated with heavy metals on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina.

Great interview with Villanova University astronomer Ed Guinan, who explains today’s news of the latest paper on why Betelgeuse experienced such a deep dimming this past Fall and Winter. We cover a lot of territory from how Gene Roddenberry chose the name Guinan for the Whoopi Goldberg character on Star Trek’s Next Generation to the history behind the pole star’s mysterious brightening; to the Dog Star Sirius; to why life might still be possible around red dwarfs; to our Sun’s longterm future. Please listen!

In a stroke of serendipity during a wide-ranging podcast interview, Villanova University astronomer Edward Guinan explains the paper behind today’s news flap about the red supergiant star’s inexplicable dimming. The most recent explanation is that dust generated from cooling plasma spewed forth from the massive star’s interior caused Betelgeuse to appear more dim than usual. While Guinan acknowledges this scenario is a possibility, he remains skeptical. Please listen to this candid and entertaining episode!

Continue reading “Episode 11 --- Betelgeuse Dimming Mystery Might Be Solved, Says Edward Guinan” »

Safe Messaging

Cybersecurity experts have long warned that quantum computers, whenever it is that they become useful, will render useless most conventional forms of encryption. This new satellite experiment, which is described in research published in the journal Nature, suggests that it may be possible to send secure messages yet.

“A remarkable feature of the entanglement-based quantum cryptography as we demonstrated here is that such security is ensured even if the satellite is controlled by an adversary,” University of Science and Technology physicist Jian-Wei Pan told Space.com.