Lifeboat Foundation

Disruptive solutions that are poised to change the world — a special report produced by Scientific American in collaboration with the World Economic Forum.

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

Here’s a snapshot of AI-predicted built-up areas in Aparri from Planet satellite images. This image was processed by the DATOS Project team before the onslaught of Typhoon #OmpongPH. Images will also be processed after the typhoon to detect changes in urban areas, such as destroyed buildings and changes in landscape.

Some older people take aspirin every day to prevent a heart attack or stroke. But a landmark Australian study has found they may be wasting their time.

How do you know where anything is in space? Sure, you can say, “Oh, that star, it’s the one in the middle of the Big Dipper,” but that’s not very useful in an era of incredible telescopes peeping at galaxies billions of light-years away. On January 1, 2019, scientists will adopt the newest, internationally standardized frame of reference to help locate things in space.

The third edition of the International Celestial Reference Frame, or ICRF-3, is the most up-to-date version of the International Astronomy Union’s standardized reference frame. Imagine the universe as a graph from geometry—scientists need a place to put the origin and axes.

A devastating solar storm which could wipe out communications on Earth and fry power grids is a matter of ‘when not if’ the head of the Met Office’s Space Weather Monitoring centre has warned.

Extreme space weather has already caused widespread disruption, with a geomagnetic storm leaving six million people without power in 1989 while Apollo astronauts narrowly missed being exposed to deadly radiation in 1972 and solar flares in 2003 forced the crew of the International Space Station to take cover.

The largest solar storm ever recorded, The Carrington Event in 1859, knocked out Telegraph systems and even set fire to paper in offices.

Continue reading “Devastating solar storm is a matter of ‘when not if’ warns Met Office as Solar Orbiter begins testing” »

Some bacteria make energy in a process that is accompanied by transfer of electrons to a mineral. A previously unknown electron-transfer pathway now reveals an energy-generation system used by bacteria in the human gut.

Machine learning supports 20-year-old theory of bizarre electron behaviour in high-temperature superconductor.

All the evidence shows our universe emerged from a single event: an eruption commonly known as the Big Bang.

What preceded that point is a mystery.

But it has significant implications.

Continue reading “Stephen Hawking’s ‘ghosts’ may have been found” »