Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The plan would be to launch Starship from a SpaceX facility in Texas, land it in the sea off Australia’s coast and recover it on Australian territory. Getting permission to do so would require loosening US export controls on sophisticated space technologies bound for Australia, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

President Joe Biden’s administration already has sought to ease similar restrictions within the AUKUS security alliance, opens new tab, a grouping of the United States, Australia and Britain aimed at countering China.

SpaceX, the US Space Force and the Australian Space Agency did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

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On this day in history in 1971, Apollo 15 lunar module “Falcon” landed on the Moon. Astronauts David Scott and Jim Irwin spent 66 hours, 54 minutes, 53 seconds on the lunar surface. More on Apollo 15:

Ever wanted to drive on the Moon? Apollo 15, the fourth crewed mission to land on the Moon, was the first Apollo mission to utilize a Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV).

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Shiver me timbers: Security researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to spy on what’s visible on your screen by intercepting electromagnetic radiation from video cables with great accuracy, thanks to artificial intelligence. The team from Uruguay’s University of the Republic says their AI-powered cable-tapping method is good enough that these attacks are likely already happening.

Back in the analog video era, it was relatively straightforward for hackers to reconstruct what was on a screen by detecting the leakage from video cables. But once digital protocols like HDMI took over, that became much trickier. The data zipping through HDMI is much more complex than old analog signals.

However, those digital signals still leak some electromagnetic radiation as they transmit between your computer and display. By training an AI model on samples of matching original and intercepted HDMI signals, the researchers were able to decode those leaks into readable screen captures.

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“These spots are a big surprise,” said Dr. David Flannery. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”

Did Mars once have life billions of years ago? This is what NASA’s Perseverance (Percy) rover hopes to figure out, and scientists might be one step closer to answering that question with a recent discovery by the car-sized robotic explorer that found a unique rock with “leopard spots” that have caused some in the scientific community to claim this indicates past life might have once existed on the now cold and dry Red Planet. However, others have just as quickly rushed to say that further evidence is required before jumping to conclusions.

Upon analyzing the rock using Percy’s intricate suite of scientific instruments, scientists determined that it contained specific chemical signatures indicative of life possibly having existed billions of years ago when liquid water flowed across the surface. However, the science team is also considering other reasons for the rock’s unique appearance, including further research to determine if the findings are consistent with potential ancient life.

The unique features of the rock include calcium sulfate veins with reddish material between the veins which indicate the presence of hematite, which is responsible for the Red Planet’s rusty color. Upon further inspecting the reddish material, Percy identified dozens of off-white splotches at the millimeter-scale with black material surrounding it, hence the name “leopard spots”

Continue reading “Peculiar Rock Found by NASA’s Perseverance Rover Leaves Scientists Puzzled” | >

Putting 50 billion transistors into a microchip the size of a fingernail is a feat that requires manufacturing methods of nanometer level precision—layering of thin films, then etching, depositing, or using photolithography to create the patterns of semiconductor, insulator, metal, and other materials that make up the tiny working devices within the chip.

The process relies heavily on solvents that carry and deposit materials in each layer—solvents that can be difficult to handle and toxic to the environment.

Now researchers led by Fiorenzo Omenetto, Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts, have developed a nanomanufacturing approach that uses water as the primary solvent, making it more environmentally compatible and opening the door to the development of devices that combine inorganic and biological materials.

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