Lifeboat Foundation

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Using the world’s smallest computer, University of Michigan (UM) researchers were able to figure out why one species of snail was able to survive a situation that pushed more than 50 others into extinction.

“We were able to get data that nobody had been able to obtain,” researcher David Blaauw said in a press release. “And that’s because we had a tiny computing system that was small enough to stick on a snail.”

Continue reading “Snails Wearing World’s Tiniest Computer Solve Extinction Mystery” »

An asteroid as large as Big Ben will be approaching Earth in January, 2022. However, it is not the only asteroid heading towards Earth.

The year 2022 has just started and here we are with dire NASA warnings of potentially hazardous asteroids heading for Earth. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has reported that as many as five asteroids are coming towards the Earth in the first month of the year. An asteroid around the size if a bus will approach the Earth in the first week of January itself.

Asteroids, comets, and meteoroids are large rocks in space that orbit the Sun and occasionally vary their orbits due to the gravitational attraction of planets. When these space rocks do collide with any planet, it’s usually a disaster. That’s why, even when an asteroid with a diameter of more than 150 metres approaches Earth, NASA classifies it as a potentially hazardous asteroid and monitors it closely.

Continue reading “NASA raises warning of 5 asteroids heading towards Earth in January, 2022” »

We thought that all the dinosaurs went extinct when an asteroid hit the earth some 65 million years ago until recently. Now we know that some of the dinosaur species, mostly avians, survived and become birds. Scientists are trying to tweak chicken DNA to produce atavistic, dinosaur-like, traits that are embedded in the genes of birds for years.

A research team led by Yale paleontologist and developmental biologist Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar and Harvard developmental biologist Arhat Abzhanov conducted the first successful reversion of a bird’s skull features back in 2015. The team replicated ancestral molecular development to transform chicken embryos in a laboratory to turn its beak into a snout and palate configuration similar to that of small dinosaurs such as Velociraptor and Archaeopteryx.

“I wanted to know what the beak was skeletally, functionally and when this major transformation occurred from a normal vertebrate snout to the very unique structures used in birds,” Bhullar said.

We live in a very fast-changing world and quite an unpredictable one. In part, it is because we got lots of technological powers while our brain stays just the same as in pre-technological times. What do we teach children in this world? How can we help them to reflect on their thinking, get wiser in using the new technological powers, develop growth mindset and resilience, see the big picture and the interconnections within the complex systems (be that our body, ecological system, or the whole Universe)? We are trying to address these issues by teaching space science, AI and cognitive science, and existential risks and opportunities to pre-teens. In three years, the kids get an opportunity to talk to some of the most prominent thinkers in the field, reflect on deep questions, develop connections with specialists from multiple fields, from space law to ecology to virology, present their work at conferences. Check out our classes:

Art of Inquiry is an Online Science School for Young Explorers. We teach inquiry, thinking skills, and cutting-edge science. Our speakers and consultants are distinguished experts from academia, AI and space industry.

The new system improves the capabilities of NASA JPL’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies to assess the impact risk of asteroids that can come close to our planet.

But strangely, this green shade disappears before it reaches the one or two tails trailing behind the comet.

Astronomers, scientists, and chemists have been puzzled by this mystery for almost 90 years. In 1930, it was suggested that this phenomenon was due to sunlight destroying diatomic carbon. The carbon is created from the interaction between sunlight and organic matter on the comet’s head. However, due to the instability of dicarbon, this theory has been hard to test.

Scientists at UNSW Sydney have finally found a way to test this chemical reaction in a laboratory – and in doing so, has proven this 90-year-old theory correct. They solved this mystery with the help of a vacuum chamber, a lot of lasers, and one powerful cosmic reaction.

Russian state TV is increasingly hysterical in its forecasts of an upcoming war, warning domestic audiences that the conflict could even become nuclear.

You may not see them coming, but the effects of climate change are starting to be felt in certain parts of the world. An example of this is the destruction of several coral reefs around the globe in recent years. As devastating as that sounds, it is only the prologue to a long list of potentially catastrophic events yet to arrive. In the long term, climate change threatens to eventually drive humans towards extinction. Therefore, while little steps, like planting more trees and turning out lightbulbs when not in use, are certainly useful, bigger steps are needed to fend off the devastating effects of climate change.

An internal combustion engine is one of the prime contributors to climate change-causing carbon emissions. Such engines produce large quantities of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and other hydrocarbons that harm the environment and cause respiratory disorders in individuals. Due to these—and many more—reasons, electric vehicles, or EVs, need to replace the ones with traditional combustion engines.

EV owners can save about US$700 a year on fuel costs alone. Also, the maintenance expenses of EVs are lower than those of standard vehicles. So, owning EVs can help them save money and reduce their extreme reliance on fossil fuel, thereby slowing down its inevitable depletion from the earth. Additionally, EVs are incredibly efficient as they only consume approximately 25–40 kWh per 100 miles. Most importantly, EVs reduce CO₂ emissions by nearly 178 million kg. What’s more, despite the high fuel efficiency and smaller carbon footprint, EVs can outperform vehicles with traditional combustion engines easily.

Meteorite impacts load the atmosphere with dust and cover the Earth’s surface with debris. They have long been debated as a trigger of mass extinctions throughout Earth history. Impact winters generally last 10 years, whereas ejecta blankets persist for 103–105 years. We show that only meteorite impacts that emplaced ejecta blankets rich in K-feldspar (Kfs) correlate to Earth system crises (n = 11, p 0.000005). Kfs is a powerful ice-nucleating aerosol, yet is normally rare in atmospheric dust mineralogy. Ice nucleation plays an important part in cloud microphysics, which modulates the global albedo.