Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 9800

Along with Richard Feynman’s varied scribblings and thoughts, his Nobel Prize, tambourine and book collection were also available at Sotheby’s.

One of the undisputed geniuses in the world of 20th-century physics was theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and science enthusiasts will be delighted to learn that Feynman’s incandescent rough drafts of his thoughts and ideas headed to auction on Friday at Sotheby’s in New York, fetching a selling price of 4,922,625 USD.

As will be well-known to many people, Richard Feynman was a great popularizer of physics, and wrote entertaining and informative classics like S urely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, and What Do You Care What Other People Think? As The New York Times reminds us, Feynman also played a crucial role in determining what had caused the devastating loss of the space shuttle Challenger.

Read more

A robot barista can whip up 120 drinks an hour — and it reveals a growing trend that is transforming the restaurant industry.

Trendy coffee roasters including Intelligentsia, Ritual, and Equator have partnered with Café X Technologies to create a $25,000 robot barista, CNBC reports. The robot, which operates as the sole barista in a San Francisco café, can make any drink you would expect at a standard trendy coffee shop, including espressos, flat whites, and cortados.

“I don’t see the robot revolution as a problem,” 24-year-old inventor Henry Hu told CNBC. “The idea isn’t to scare you or harm you in any way. The point is to get you your coffee as quickly and deliciously as possible.”

Read more

From blizzards on top of Mount Everest to the extreme cold of the Arctic to the scorching heat of the Sahara deserts, researchers can now recreate the Earth’s most extreme climates and conditions — all in one place.

The research infrastructure, terraXcube, which opened to the public in Bolzano, South Tryol, Italy, on November 30, can simulate the world’s most extreme climate and weather conditions. It can recreate environmental factors such as air pressure, air humidity, and solar radiation individually or in combination, enabling researchers to investigate how the human body reacts to various extreme climatic conditions.

Read more

It’s that time of year again, time for one of my favorite holiday traditions: the 11th annual Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Every day until Tuesday, December 25, this page will present one new incredible image of our universe from NASA’s Hubble telescope. Be sure to bookmark this calendar and come back every day until the 25th, or follow on Twitter (@TheAtlPhoto), Facebook, or Tumblr for daily updates. I hope you enjoy these amazing and awe-inspiring images and the efforts of the science teams who have brought them to Earth. As I do every year, I want to say again how fortunate I feel to have been able to share photo stories with you all year, and how much fun I have putting this calendar together every December. Wishing you all a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and peace on Earth.

Read more

Jack Poulson is the former Google Senior Research Scientist who quit the company’s machine learning division over Project Dragonfly, the company’s secret plan to build a censoring Chinese search engine designed to help the country’s spies surveil dissident search activity.

In an editorial on The Intercept, Poulson describes the series of events that led up to his resignation: a chain of execs who, in private meetings and public statements, engaged in hypocritical deflection and spin rather than giving the straight answer about why they were going to go into China and what the result of that would be (answers: “To make money,” and “complicity in human rights abuses”).

Read more

Miguel Claro is a professional photographer, author and science communicator based in Lisbon, Portugal, who creates spectacular images of the night sky. As a European Southern Observatory Photo Ambassador and member of The World At Night and the official astrophotographer of the Dark Sky Alqueva Reserve, he specializes in astronomical “Skyscapes” that connect both Earth and night sky. Join Miguel here as he takes us through his photograph “The Colourful Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda.”

Around the same time that the first human ancestors of the genus Homo roamed the Earth, light from the Milky Way’s closest neighboring galaxy began its 2.5 million-year trek to our planet, creating the image we see today.

Homo, the genus that includes modern humans, is estimated to be between 1.5 and 2.5 million years old. Meanwhile, the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is 2.5 million light-years away from Earth. In the amount of time it took for that light to reach us, humans have evolved from the stone tool-wielding Homo habilis up to the point where we have the necessary technology to construct powerful telescopes, giving us the capability to observe, study, photograph and understand the wonders of the vast universe. [Andromeda Galaxy Photos: Amazing Pictures of M31].

Read more