Lifeboat Foundation

After years of prototype testing, crash landings, and explosions, the Super Heavy booster and Starship second stage are ready for the inaugural flight. This test flight will pave way for future missions to the Moon and Mars, but first, SpaceX must get Starship off the ground.

Due to the nature of this test flight, the launch date and time are fickle and subject to great change as SpaceX will take all precautions necessary to ensure Starship/SuperHeavy collects as much data as possible during its flight.

The vehicles set to perform this inaugural test flight are Booster 7 and Ship 24. The last ship to complete a test flight was SN15, which survived its short suborbital test hop. All of the prior ships and boosters are detailed in the History section of this article. For a comprehensive log of all testing done on Ship 24 and Booster 7, check out our Starship Orbital Launch Timeline Checklist [S24 and B7] | Live Updates article!

Deep brain stimulation is a surgical procedure where electrodes are placed in specific areas of the brain. The electrodes are connected by wires to a small device, similar to a pacemaker, that is placed under the skin in the chest area.

The electrodes create electrical pulses that override abnormal signals that could cause neurological issues.

There has also recently been a move toward developing less invasive methods for deep brain stimulation.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has proven just how powerful it is with its latest discovery: sand storms swirling on a planet 40 light-years from Earth, or about 235 trillion miles away.

One of Webb’s greatest powers is its ability to decipher what’s going on in alien atmospheres. From its vantage point in space, Webb can peer at a distant world and analyze the entire infrared spectrum of starlight passing through the planet’s atmosphere.

Different spectra of light correspond to different elements, so Webb can show astronomers exactly which gases and vapors are in another world’s atmosphere.

Large language models can’t understand language the way humans do because they can’t perceive and make sense of the world.

Summary: Researchers found a way to assess consciousness without external stimulation, using a little-used approach where volunteers squeeze a force sensor with their hand when they breathe in and release it when they breathe out, resulting in more precise and sensitive measurements that may help improve treatment for insomnia and coma reversal.

Source: picower institute for learning and memory.

Studies of consciousness often run into a common conundrum of science—it’s hard to measure a system without the measurement affecting the system. Researchers assessing consciousness, for instance as volunteers receive anesthesia, typically use spoken commands to see if subjects can still respond, but that sound might keep them awake longer or wake them up sooner than normal.

A new robot just 10 microns across is able to navigate in a physiological environment and perform a variety of tasks, both autonomously or through external control by a human operator.

Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed a new “hybrid micro-robot” the size of a single biological cell. This can be controlled and moved using two different mechanisms – electric and magnetic.

The tail fibre of an extracellular contractile injection system (eCIS) from Photorhabdus asymbiotica recognizes targets expressed on eukaryotic host cells, and can be reprogrammed to target specific organisms and cell types for delivery of novel protein payloads.

Puzzle over ‘Hubble constant’ could suggest many of our basic assumptions are wrong We may be fundamentally wrong about some of the deepest parts of the universe, according to a new study. For years, scientists have been puzzled over the “Hubble tension”. That refers to the difficulty over measuring how quickly the universe is expanding: different measurements show different speeds, and scientists have been unable to say why.

The recent discovery that plants emit inaudible sounds under stress has caused a stir in the scientific community and reminded me of a story from decades ago.