Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a new wearable device that turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. The device is a thin, flexible strip worn on a fingertip and generates small amounts of electricity when a person’s finger sweats or presses on it.

More interestingly, this sweat-powered device is capable of generating power even when the wearer is asleep or sitting still. This could open up some very interesting possibilities in the wearable space, as the researchers have now figured out how to harness the energy that can be extracted from human sweat even when a person is not moving.

A new artificial intelligence method removes the effect of gravity on cosmic images, showing the real shapes of distant galaxies.

A NASA study has revealed how a ‘wobble’ in the Moon’s orbit could cause devastating flooding in the 2030s.

Research led by the US space agency predicts cities along the country’s coast could see three or four times as many high-tide flood days annually for a decade.

The Moon’s gravitational pull impacts tidal forces on Earth.

Circa 2019

Bezos has discussed his hope of building O’Neill colonies, spinning cylinders in space that would replicate gravity and sustain human life.

Boiling lobsters alive may be banned under a new law in the UK designed to protect the welfare rights of animals considered sentient beings. So, are lobsters sentient, do they feel pain, and what does science have to say about the moral quagmire of crustacean agony and cooking pots?

Back in May 2021, the UK government introduced a bill to formally recognize animals as sentient beings. Among the many facets of the bill, it aimed to limit the import of products from trophy hunting, push for fairer space requirements for farm animals, and stop people from owning primates as pets.

However, the bill only covered animals with a backbone and didn’t include any protections for non-vertebrates, which includes octopuses, squid, insects, and crustaceans. The Times reports that ministers are now preparing to back an amendment to the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK Parliament, to extend the legislation to shellfish and cephalopod mollusks. As per the report, this is likely to involve an outright ban on boiling lobsters alive.

Astronomers estimate 29 habitable planets are positioned to see Earth transit and intercept human broadcasts.

Sky surveys are invaluable for exploring the universe, allowing celestial objects to be catalogued and analyzed without the need for lengthy observations. But in providing a general map or image of a region of the sky, they are also one of the largest data generators in science, currently imaging tens of millions to billions of galaxies over the lifetime of an individual survey. In the near future, for example, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will produce 20 TB of data per night, generate about 10 million alerts daily, and end with a final data set of 60 PB in size.

As a result, sky surveys have become increasingly labor-intensive when it comes to sifting through the gathered datasets to find the most relevant information or new discovery. In recent years machine learning has added a welcome twist to the process, primarily in the form of supervised and unsupervised algorithms used to train the computer models that mine the data. But these approaches present their own challenges; for example, supervised learning requires image labels that must be manually assigned, a task that is not only time-consuming but restrictive in scope; at present, only about 1% of all known galaxies have been assigned such labels.

Continue reading “Self-supervised machine learning adds depth, breadth and speed to sky surveys” »

Four planets locked in a perfect rhythm around a nearby star are destined to be pinballed around their solar system when their sun eventually dies, according to a study led by the University of Warwick that peers into its future.

Astronomers have modeled how the change in gravitational forces in the system as a result of the star becoming a white dwarf will cause its planets to fly loose from their orbits and bounce off each other’s gravity, like balls bouncing off a bumper in a game of pinball.

Continue reading “Star’s Death Will Play a Mean Pinball With Unusual Planetary System Locked in a Perfect Rhythm” »

Space exploration is driven by technology – sometimes literally in the case of propulsion technologies. Solar sails are one of those propulsion technologies that has been getting a lot of attention lately. They have some obvious advantages, such as not requiring fuel, and their ability to last almost indefinitely. But they have some disadvantages too, not the least of which is how difficult they are to deploy in space. Now, a team from NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed a novel time of composite boom that they believe can help solve that weakness of solar sails, and they have a technology demonstration mission coming up next year to prove it.

The mission, known as the “Advanced Composite Solar Sail System” (ACS3) mission is designed around a 12U CubeSat, which measures in at a tiny 23cm x 23 cm x 34 cm (9 in x 9 in x 13 in). The solar sail it hopes to deploy will come in at almost 200 square meters (527 sq ft), and both it and its composite booms will fit inside the CubeSat enclosure, which is not much larger than a toaster oven.

The booms themselves are made out of a novel composite that is 75% lighter than previous deployable booms, while also suffering from only 1% of the thermal distortion that previous metallic booms were subjected to. They also conveniently roll into a 18 cm diameter spool that can be easily stored and easily deployed once the CubeSat is in space.