Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists are no strangers to healthy debate. You need criticism to strengthen your ideas, and when debate is done right, both parties leave knowing more than they did when they started. But there are some things that will just make a scientist mad. One of those things? Saying their scientific theory isn’t scientific. That’s what a trio of physicists did in a 2017 article they published in Scientific American, which stated that the idea of an expanding universe simply isn’t testable. The response from other physicists? Oh, it’s on.

Situated at about 340 million light-years away from Earth, it finds itself very close to its host star (around a hundredth of the distance between the Earth and the Sun), which itself is a medium-sized active K dwarf in the Virgo Constellation.

K2-229b orbits this star every fourteen hours, according to the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. “Interestingly K2-229b is also the innermost planet in a system of at least three planets, though all three orbit much closer to their star than Mercury. More discoveries like this will help us shed light on the formation of these unusual planets, as well as Mercury itself,” Armstrong added.

Using the K2 telescope, Armstrong and colleagues employed the Doppler spectroscopy technique — also known as the ‘wobble method’ to discover and characterise this faraway planet.

Continue reading “Astronomers detect a hot, metallic Earth-sized planet outside our solar system” »

Photographer Amanda Cross, of Lancashire, UK, wrote:

I wanted to compare the colors of different stars next to each other. These are stacks of Rigel, Betelgeuse and Sirius. I took individual images 60 seconds apart with iso 16000 and speed 1/50, stacked them with starstax and presented them together to show the different colors of the stars. I took the images deliberately out of focus to show the colors. The color variations are from the Earth’s atmosphere which splits the light from the star and the camera picks up the colors.

SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son said he envisions the project, which runs the gamut from power generation to panel and equipment manufacturing, as a way to help wean Saudi Arabia off its dependence on oil for electricity, create as many as 100,000 jobs and shave $40 billion off power costs. The total capacity to be built under its umbrella will be 200 gigawatts by 2030, the company said.

Saudi Arabia and SoftBank Group Corp. signed a memorandum of understanding to build a $200 billion solar power development that’s exponentially larger than any other project.

Some of my thoughts on AI politicians out in The Next Web: https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2018/03/27/th…ent-potus/ #transhumanism

The duties of the President of the United States of America could, arguably, be performed by a computer. Here’s how and why we should make that happen.

Could advances in tech and medicine provide the key to finding solutions to some of humanity’s most devastating diseases?

Insight into how plants make cellulose could lead to a better understanding of how to break it down for renewable fuels.

Without an actual discovery, it can be difficult to convince us laypeople that there’s really such a thing as “dark matter.” It seems to interact with our universe solely through gravity, and no experiment has detected it here on Earth yet. So what if there’s an explanation to what’s causing the dark matter’s using physics that already exists, like Higgs bosons and black holes?

A team of three European physicists has made what could be seen as a controversial statement: “The existence of dark matter might not require physics beyond the standard model.” It’s still just a hypothesis as the hunt for dark matter continues, but it’s an interesting thought to digest.

First, you might be wondering what I’m talking about at all. You only experience regular matter in your day-to-day life—it’s what makes up every planet, star, and galaxy. But astronomical observations imply that there’s gravity from six times more matter in the universe, stuff we can’t see with our eyes or instruments, called dark matter. As of yet, lots of experiments have tried and failed to identify the source of this gravity.

Continue reading “Could Higgs Bosons and Primordial Black Holes Explain Dark Matter?” »

Fiber-optic cables package everything from financial data to cat videos into light, but when the signal arrives at your local data center, it runs into a silicon bottleneck. Instead of light, computers run on electrons moving through silicon-based chips, which are less efficient than photonics. To break through, scientists have been developing lasers that work on silicon. Researchers now write that the future of silicon-based lasers may be in quantum dots.