Lifeboat Foundation

This evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will give an update on the design and future of his company’s next-generation rocket, Starship, a massive vehicle that is meant to take people to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The concept for Starship has evolved in numerous ways over the last few years, and now Musk plans to reveal the vehicle’s latest blueprints.

Musk is giving an hour-long presentation on the rocket at SpaceX’s test facility in Boca Chica, Texas, a tiny town just north of the Mexican border. SpaceX has been building lots of test hardware for Starship at the site, and the CEO will likely be surrounded by this shiny material during his talk. As you watch, keep an eye out for a large Starship test vehicle that’s meant to perform high-altitude test flights in the months ahead.

Continue reading “Watch Elon Musk give a design update on SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket” »

Finally, the future that children of the ’80s want to see is on its way. NASA is working on its very own Transformer — a bot called Shapeshifter, made up of smaller robots which can combine into different configurations to roll, swim, fly, and float.

Shapeshifter is a prototype for exploring Saturn’s moon Titan. Before it ended its mission by burning up in Saturn’s rings, the Cassini probe flew by Titan more than one hundred times, observing the moon which is surprisingly similar to Earth. It has rivers, lakes, and rain, but instead of being made of water, these bodies are made of liquid methane and ethane. On Earth, these are gases, but in the freezing temperatures of Titan, they are liquid. Cassini collected mapping data of the surface, and scientists have been keen to discover more since then.

Continue reading “Autobots, Roll Out: NASA Creates Transforming Robot for Exploring Titan” »

Nuclear fusion could be the clean energy the world needs—and private companies are now working on machines to harness it.

Tonight—just like every night—the pursuit of E.T. perseveres in Hat Creek, California.

There, in the midst of the Cascade Mountains, the faint buzz of the Allen Telescope Array hums on a secluded and scrubby field where jackrabbits wander and rattlesnakes roam.

Since 2007, the array’s 42 radio dishes have scanned the skies for signals from alien civilizations. Detecting one is the longest of long shots. So far, nothing suggesting an extraterrestrial intelligence has been found. Here at Hat Creek, a close encounter with a bear seems more likely.

The most important image ever taken in history of Astronomy…

This alternate explanation for ‘Planet Nine,’ proposed by scientists in a new paper, poses some fundamental questions like: Should we visit it?

The foundational theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, predicts…

The KATRIN experiment has turned up a new, more-precise-than-ever measurement for the barely-detectable neutrino mass.

Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli organic chemist and professor of medicinal chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, remembers the letdown after his groundbreaking discoveries surrounding the structure of the cannabis compounds CBD and THC in 1963 and 1964, followed by clinical tests with CBD published in 1980.

“Not much happened,” Mechoulam said, noting that it would take more than 30 years before his clinical work on using CBD, or cannabidiol, to treat epilepsy became widely accepted. Greenwich Biosciences, which is owned by GW Pharmaceuticals, was able to develop the first cannabis-derived drug that built on Mechoulam’s research. The drug, Epidiolex, treats seizures associated with two rare forms of epilepsy and was approved by the FDA only last year.

But even as his work laid the foundation for the modern cannabis industry and for understanding how cannabis interacts with the human body, a white whale eluded research: cannabis acids, which are compounds that are produced in the plant when it is alive and may be more potent than their better-known derivatives, such as CBD and THC.