Lifeboat Foundation

The kilogram is one of the most important and widely used units of measure in the world — unless you live in the US. For everyone else, having an accurate reading on what a kilogram is can be vitally important in fields like manufacturing, engineering, and transportation. Of course, a kilogram is 1,000 grams or 2.2 pounds if you want to get imperial. That doesn’t help you define a kilogram, though. The kilogram is currently controlled by a metal slug in a French vault, but its days of importance are numbered. Scientists are preparing to re define the kilogram using science.

It’s actually harder than you’d expect to know when a measurement matches the intended standard, even when it’s one of the well–define d Systéme International (SI) units. For example, the meter was originally define d in 1793 as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the north pole. That value was wrong, but the meter has since been re define d in more exact terms like krypton-86 wavelength emissions and most recently the speed of light in a vacuum. The second was previously define d as a tiny fraction of how long it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. Now, it’s pegged to the amount of time it takes a cesium-133 atom to oscillate 9,192,631,770 times. Again, this is immutable and extremely precise.

That brings us to the kilogram, which is a measurement of mass. Weight is different and changes based on gravity, but a kilogram is always a kilogram because it comes from measurements of density and volume. The definition of the kilogram is tied to the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK, see above), a small cylinder of platinum and iridium kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France. Scientists have created dozens of copies of the IPK so individual nations can standardize their measurements, but that’s a dangerous way to go about it. If anything happened to the IPK, we wouldn’t have a standard kilogram anymore.

Continue reading “Scientists Are About to Redefine the Kilogram” »

To mark the second season of the television series Mars, Hollywood director Ron Howard talked to the BBC about creating a realistic depiction of the first human colonies on the Red Planet.

If humankind is to expand out into the Universe, then Mars is likely to be our first stepping stone. With an atmosphere largely consisting of carbon dioxide and temperatures that vary between 20C and −125C, the Red Planet isn’t exactly ideal for human occupation.

We’d have to adapt to living almost entirely within sealed habitats — so outdoors-y types need not apply.

Nanostraws could be a way to deliver molecules into many cells at once, which may one day improve gene therapy for cancer and other diseases.

Our Solar System is incredibly old by human standards. The Sun, sitting in the center, is thought to be just over 4.6 billion years old, which is an almost unfathomable amount of time to you and I. But it’s actually not all that impressive when it comes to stars.

A new survey of one particular star here in our own Milky Way galaxy reveals that it’s a whole lot older than anyone thought. In fact, it’s old enough to make our own star look like a youngster by comparison. The elderly star is called (deep breath) 2MASS J18082002–5104378 B, and what it lacks in a flashy name it more than makes up for in age. Astronomers now believe it to be an incredible 13.5 billion years old.

Two different spacecraft are currently preparing to swipe a hunk of two different asteroids that they’ve been journeying toward for the past few years. The asteroids could also be among the most profitable to mine for resources at some point in the future.

These results substantially change the debate on whether cell-phone use is a cancer risk at all.

The studies were nearly two decades in the making.

The incredible 8k footage was shot at the International Space Station using a RED camera.

History is full of forgotten heroes. Sometimes that’s because somebody else got credit for their work. Sometimes it’s because they were women in a male-dominated world. And sometimes it’s because a couple of continents *cough* Western society *cough* decided they didn’t want to include them in the history books. Meet Ibn al-Haytham — the guy who basically invented Science with a capital S.

The finding could help answer a longstanding question of how massive stone blocks were hauled into place.

• By Owen Jarus, LiveScience on November 5, 2018