Lifeboat Foundation

On its final flyby of Saturn’s largest moon in 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gathered radar data revealing that the small liquid lakes in Titan’s northern hemisphere are surprisingly deep, perched atop hills and filled with methane.

The new findings, published April 15 in Nature Astronomy, are the first confirmation of just how deep some of Titan’s lakes are (more than 300 feet, or 100 meters) and of their composition. They provide new information about the way liquid methane rains on, evaporates from and seeps into Titan—the only planetary body in our solar system other than Earth known to have stable liquid on its surface.

Scientists have known that Titan’s hydrologic cycle works similarly to Earth’s—with one major difference. Instead of water evaporating from seas, forming clouds and rain, Titan does it all with methane and ethane. We tend to think of these hydrocarbons as a gas on Earth, unless they’re pressurized in a tank. But Titan is so cold that they behave as liquids, like gasoline at room temperature on our planet.

Continue reading “Cassini reveals surprises with Titan’s lakes” »

This is an old study with new data from UK Biobank.

People more or less keeping to NHS guidelines at higher risk than those who eat little.

28 votes and so far on Reddit.

Mars has water trapped in the polar ice caps. More water may lie just beneath the surface. A new study suggests that water also flows on the surface.

Next-generation, low-power optical data transmission may rely on polarization rather than switching laser pulses on and off.

Software that rapidly analyses digital devices and builds a list of a suspect’s known associates could be a powerful tool for solving crimes.

Qualcomm said it plans to begin testing its new Cloud AI 100 chip with partners such as Microsoft Corp later this year, with mass production likely to begin in 2020.

Qualcomm’s new chip is designed for what artificial intelligence researchers call “inference” – the process of using an AI algorithm that has been “trained” with massive amounts of data in order to, for example, translate audio into text-based requests.

Analysts believe chips for speeding up inference will be the largest part of the AI chip market.

Continue reading “Qualcomm Aims for Quantum AI Chips” »

Kepler-47 is a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old system located 3,340 light-years from Earth. One of its stars is quite sunlike, but the other is considerably smaller, harboring just one-third the mass of our sun. The two stars orbit their common center of mass once every 7.45 Earth days.

Back in 2012, Welsh and his colleagues, led by fellow SDSU astronomer Jerome Orosz, announced the discovery of two planets circling the two stars. These worlds, Kepler-47b and Kepler-47c, both have two suns in their skies, just like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine in the “Star Wars” universe.

Creating a lithium-ion battery that can charge in a matter of minutes but still operate at a high capacity is possible, according to research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute just published in Nature Communications. This development has the potential to improve battery performance for consumer electronics, solar grid storage, and electric vehicles.