Lifeboat Foundation

In August of 2016, astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) announced the discovery of an exoplanet in the neighboring system of Proxima Centauri. The news was greeted with considerable excitement, as this was the closest rocky planet to our Solar System that also orbited within its star’s habitable zone.

Since then, multiple studies have been conducted to determine if this planet could actually support life.

Continue reading “Astronomers Have Found Potential Life-Supporting Conditions on The Nearest Exoplanet” »

The farther you get from the equator, the less effective solar panels become at reliably generating power all year round. And it’s not just the shorter spans of sunlight during the winter months that are a problem; even a light dusting of snow can render solar panels ineffective. As a result of global warming, winters are only going to get more severe, but there’s at least one silver lining as researchers from UCLA have come up with a way to harness electricity from all that snow.

The technology they developed is called a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator (or snow TENG, for short) which generates energy from the exchange of electrons. If you’ve ever received a nasty shock when touching a metal door handle, you’ve already experienced the science at work here. As it falls towards earth, snowflakes are positively charged and ready to give up electrons. In a way, it’s almost free energy ready for the taking, so after testing countless materials with an opposite charge, the UCLA researchers (working with collaborators from the University of Toronto, McMaster University, and the University of Connecticut) found that the negative charge of silicone made it most effective for harvesting electrons when it came into contact with snowflakes.

Zack Geballe spent months screwing together pairs of polished diamonds at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Geophysical Laboratory. Theory predicted that squeezed between the diamonds’ tips could be one of the most miraculous substances of modern physics—a material that, at near room temperature, could transport electricity without losing power. He just needed to get the samples to Argonne National Lab outside Chicago to heat them up with laser pulses.

When Argonne beam line scientist Yue Meng turned the lasers on, all four diamonds cracked in half.

“It was a total catastrophe,” Geballe told me while I was visiting him at the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, DC, this year.

Continue reading “The Quest for the Most Elusive Material in Physics” »

Highlighting third-party sales, eBay’s bread-and-butter, Amazon’s Bezos may have stoked a fire that could ultimately fuel eBay stock gains.

Stable plasma conditions are generated in a Z-pinch device for the first time, offering a new route more compact fusion reactors.

Q&A with neuroethicist Francis Shen and MRI developer Michael Garwood.

It’s like Ultimate Frisbee meets Quidditch.

CRISPR Research Moves Out Of Labs And Into Clinics Around The World : Shots — Health News This could be a crucial year for the powerful gene-editing technique CRISPR as researchers start testing it in patients to treat diseases such as cancer, blindness and sickle cell disease.

With funding from NASA, researchers are exploring how to control inflatable robots for future space missions.