Lifeboat Foundation

Last observed in 2015, the black hole is spewing out ‘wobbly’ plasma jets that move so fast they change orientation within minutes.

Some 8,000 light-years from Earth in the Cygnus constellation (“The Swan”), a small black hole weighing just nine times the mass of Earth’s sun is gobbling up a sun-like star. The black hole and its stellar victim are locked together in what astronomers call a binary system and orbit each other once every 6.5 days – with spectacular effects, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is reporting.

Continue reading “Astronomers Spot Distant Black Hole Spinning So Fast That It Warps Space-Time” »

At a glance, meteorites might only be marginally more interesting than regular old rocks, but look closely and they can tell us stories of ancient stars and long-lost planets. One of these stories has now been uncovered in a piece of space rock retrieved from Antarctica, containing grains from a stellar explosion that predates the Sun.

A self-taught coder dedicated a CPU core to performing continuous computations for three years to crack the puzzle, beating a competing team by mere days.

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The drone delivery of a kidney recently used for an organ transplant in Baltimore is being characterized by the University of Maryland as a “pioneering breakthrough” advancement in human medicine and aviation technology.

“It’s huge. We knew from the very first time that we met with Dr. (Joseph) Scalea, and he suggested the idea of what he wanted to do — we knew it would be earth-shattering and life-changing, and it really has become that,” Matthew Scassero, director of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site at the University of Maryland, told WTOP.

Continue reading “‘Earth-shattering’: Drone delivers kidney for transplant over Baltimore” »

There is enough room in the world’s existing parks, forests, and abandoned land to plant 1.2 trillion additional trees, which would have the CO₂ storage capacity to cancel out a decade of carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new analysis by ecologist Thomas Crowther and colleagues at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university.

The research, presented at this year’s American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington, D.C., argues that planting additional trees is one of the most effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases.

Trees are “our most powerful weapon in the fight against climate change,” Crowther told The Independent. Combining forest inventory data from 1.2 million locations around the world and satellite images, the scientists estimate there are 3 trillion trees on Earth — seven times more than previous estimates. But they also found that there is abundant space to restore millions of acres of additional forests, not counting urban and agricultural land.

Continue reading “Planting 1.2 Trillion Trees Could Cancel Out a Decade of CO2 Emissions, Scientists Find” »

In series of talks, researchers describe major effort to address climate change through carbon-free power.

National Academies study recommends a pilot fusion energy program that aligns with MIT’s fusion approach and SPARC project.

A comprehensive new catalog that factors in “hidden” quakes is helping scientists better understand the planet’s tectonic activity.