Lifeboat Foundation

By Rachel Courtland

The crust of neutron stars is 10 billion times stronger than steel, according to new simulations. That makes the surface of these ultra-dense stars tough enough to support long-lived bulges that could produce gravitational waves detectable by experiments on Earth.

Neutron stars are the cores left behind when relatively massive stars explode in supernovae. They are incredibly dense, packing about as much mass as the sun into a sphere just 20 kilometres or so across, and some rotate hundreds of times per second.

A telescope in Arizona will conduct the largest spectroscopic survey of galaxies.

Yes, bubonic plague—the Black Death that killed millions in the Middle Ages— is still out there. It even infects and kills people in the United States. Without treatment, half the people infected die, but the Food and Drug Administration approved ciprofloxacin in 2015 to treat plague, and it has just successfully been used to stop the infection in five people.

Before ciprofloxacin was approved for use, people infected with Yersinia pestis, the plague-causing bacteria, were treated with streptomycin or doxycycline. Streptomycin kills the bacteria, but has serious side effects, and doxycycline inhibits the bacteria, but doesn’t completely kill it.

Continue reading “Bubonic Plague Is on the Rise in the US, but We Finally Know How to Treat It” »

A few hundred episodes ago, I answered the question, “What is the Universe Expanding Into?” The gist of the answer is that the Universe as we understand it, isn’t really expanding into anything.

Continue reading “What’s Outside the Universe?” »

UNICEF is looking for startups applying #datascience, #machinelearning, #blockchain or #XR to prepare young people for the jobs of tomorrow.

The UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking to make up to 100K equity-free investments to provide early stage (seed) finance to for-profit technology start-ups that have the potential to benefit humanity.

If you’ve got a start-up using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain or extended reality, registered in one of UNICEF’s programme countries, and have a working, open source prototype (or you are willing to make it open-source) showing promising results, the UNICEF Innovation Fund is looking for you.

Hyundai is teasing a new 1970s-inspired electric car concept set to be unveiled at the IAA Frankfurt Motor Show next month.

Over the last few years, Hyundai has been going through a bit of a transition.

Continue reading “Hyundai teases a new 1970s-inspired electric car to be unveiled next month” »

That vast majority of quadcopter drones produce thrust in a very straightforward way: the propellers push air downwards at a high speed which creates lift. But that doesn’t mean other means of propulsion can’t be used. YouTuber Tom Stanton often experiments with unconventional drones and methods of propulsion, and in his newest video he has made a drone fly using the Coandă effect.

The Coandă effect, named after Romanian inventor Henri Coandă, describes the propensity for fluids — including air — to cling to convex surfaces as they move across them. That’s because a low pressure zone is created around the curved surface, and the atmospheric pressure of the surrounding air pushes the moving air along. This effect can be used to redirect the flow of air, which is how Stanton wanted to provide thrust for a drone. Instead of having propellers that push directly down on the air, he used an impeller to push air outwards horizontally. The impellers are mounted on top of domes, and the Coandă effect pulls the air downwards to provide thrust.

Continue reading “Tom Stanton Builds a Drone That Flies Using the Coandă Effect” »

In a bid to accelerate training and inferences taken from artificial intelligence (AI) models, Intel has unveiled its two new processors. These two chips are part of its Nervana Neural Network Processor (NNP) selection.

The AI-focused chips will be called Spring Crest and Spring Hill, as they were disclosed on Tuesday at the Hot Chips Conference, held in Palo Alto, California.

The Hot Chips Conference is an annual tech symposium held annually in August.

Circa 2011

Considering the amount of energy packed in the nucleus of a single uranium atom, or the energy that has been continuously radiating from the sun for billions of years, or the fact that there are 10⁸⁰ particles in the observable universe, it seems that the total energy in the universe must be an inconceivably vast quantity. But it’s not; it’s probably zero.

Light, matter and antimatter are what physicists call “positive energy.” And yes, there’s a lot of it (though no one is sure quite how much). Most physicists think, however, that there is an equal amount of “negative energy” stored in the gravitational attraction that exists between all the positive-energy particles. The positive exactly balances the negative, so, ultimately, there is no energy in the universe at all.

Continue reading “What’s the Total Energy In the Universe?” »