Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 8868

Wow. The Chandra X-ray Observatory just celebrated its 20th anniversary of being launched into space! It roared into orbit on board the Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999.

Chandra was a revolution in X-ray astronomy. This high-energy form of light can’t penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, so you have to launch telescopes into space to see it. On top of that, you can’t easily focus X-rays, since they tend to pass right through mirrors. Awkward. So Chandra uses a set of nested, curved sheets of finely shaped metal set almost edge-on to the incoming X-rays. The photons hit the sheets at extremely low angle and graze off it like a rock skipping on water. In this way, the light is gently coaxed into moving in a different direction, so it can be focused this way.

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Researchers at the University of Waterloo have developed a cheaper and more efficient method for Internet-of-Things devices to receive high-speed wireless connectivity.

With 75 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices expected to be in place by 2025, a growing strain will be placed on requirements of wireless networks. Contemporary WiFi and won’t be enough to support the influx of IoT devices, the researchers highlighted in their new study.

Millimeter wave (mmWave), a that offers multi-gigahertz of unlicensed bandwidth—more than 200 times that allocated to today’s WiFi and cellular networks, can be used to address the looming issue. In fact, 5G networks are going to be powered by mmWave technology. However, the hardware required to use mmWave is expensive and power-hungry, which are significant deterrents to it being deployed in many IoT applications.

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As vital as clean water is for human life, unfortunately it’s not always easy for people to get enough. Adding insult to injury, the stuff is basically always floating around us in the air, unreachable. Now, researchers from the University of California Berkeley have developed a device that can wring drinkable amounts of water out of even the driest air.

The team says this new water harvester can produce more than 1.3 L (5.4 US cups) of water per day per kilogram (2.2 lb) of a particular water-absorbing material. This can be done even at less than 40 percent relative humidity. That’s not a whole lot of water, but it is more than enough to keep a person alive, if a situation was that dire.

The harvester was put to the test over three days in the Mojave Desert. During that time, the device produced 0.7 L (3 cups) of water per kg of material, and even on the driest day the harvester managed to wring 200 ml (6 oz) of water out of air that had an extremely low relative humidity of just seven percent.

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Nobody can say for sure. Hundreds of years ago, atoms were thought to be the smallest particles in the universe. But since then, scientists like Indu invented tools such as particle detectors, accelerators, and colliders that can study them in great detail. Thanks to these tools, they have discovered a whole set of elementary particles, which are the smallest particles we know about today.

Quarks and gluons are two such elementary particles that combine to form protons and neutrons. These, along with electrons, make up atoms. Atoms constitute most of the matter that we know about—from trees and stones to animals and birds. But Indu was amazed to learn that there is a whole set of particles that exist but are not part of atoms at all. One such elementary particle is the neutrino, Indu’s absolute favourite! Neutrinos are everywhere. They whiz across the universe—from the sun and from elsewhere in outer space. Many of them reach us here on earth too. So, how common are they?

Tell you what. Snap your fingers right now. Done? In the amount of time it took you to do this, billions of neutrinos have passed through your thumb! Neutrinos may be tiny, but they are very important because our universe is full of them. Knowing the mass of a neutrino will help Indu understand the rate at which the universe is expanding.

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Tesla is planning to ramp up installation of its new solar roof, but it needs to figure out a way to reduce installation time.

Now a new patent shows a possible solution by producing and installing solar roof tiles in jointed groups.

At Tesla’s 2019 shareholder’s meeting earlier this year, CEO Elon Musk said Tesla was still working on longevity testing for the new version of its solar roof tiles, Solar Roof V3, and that they are now installing the solar product in 8 states.

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General Motors is the latest automaker reported to be working on solid-state lithium batteries, thanks to a $2 million grant from Uncle Sam.

The money is part of a larger grant to develop more fuel-efficient powertrains, CNET reported. The company is expected to use the rest of the money to develop a lighter-weight, more efficient engine for medium duty trucks, perhaps to replace the company’s 6.2-liter V-8.

Solid-state lithium batteries replace the flammable liquid organic solvents such as ethylene carbonate as an electrolyte in conventional lithium batteries with a solid, ceramic electrolyte that isn’t flammable. That allows engineers to cram more lithium atoms into the battery to give it more energy without increasing volatility, which could lead to lighter, batteries for electric cars with longer ranges.

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Read more about this major milestone: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-…first-time

Reaching a major milestone, engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California. Once it reaches space, NASA’s most powerful and complex space telescope will explore the cosmos using infrared light, from planets and moons within our solar system to the most ancient and distant galaxies.

Fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and unitized pallet structures (UPSs) that fold up.

The fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope with its sunshield and unitized pallet structures (UPSs) that fold up around the telescope for launch, are seen partially deployed to an open configuration to enable telescope installation.

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