Lifeboat Foundation

A strong earthquake of 6.9 magnitude struck off the southern Philippine island of Mindanao on Saturday and small tsunami waves were possible along its coast as well as in parts of Indonesia and Palau, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.

There were no reports of casualties or damage, from the earthquake, which the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said struck 193 km (120 miles) east of the Philippine city of General Santos, at a depth of 60 km (37 miles).

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center initially said “hazardous tsunami waves” were possible within 300 km (186 miles) of the epicenter along the coasts of Indonesia and the Philippines.

Continue reading “Earthquake of 6.9 strikes off Philippines, small tsunami possible” »

The international mobile communications system is built on top of several layers of technology, parts of which are more than 40 years old. Some of these old technologies are insecure, others have never had a proper audit and many simply haven’t received the attention needed to secure them properly. The protocols that form the underpinnings of the mobile system weren’t built with security in mind.

Security flaws threaten our privacy and bank accounts. So why aren’t we fixing them?

Most read of 2018: A scientist at Google Brain devised a way for a machine-learning system to teach itself about how the world works.

Invented a way for neural networks to get better by working together.

Self-assembling silver tubes might someday wire up your clothes.

Inspired by blood vessels, the silver nanowires practically manufacture themselves.

Nuclear researchers suspect that there are nearly 4,000 undiscovered nuclei that may help lead us to new machines and practices that benefit human life.

Author: Artemis SpyrouPublish date:

In 1961, Nancy Grace Roman was already the first Chief of Astronomy in NASA’s Office of Space Science. She developed that program in a time before the second wave of the Women’s Movement in the United States began, when banks often refused women credit in their own names and there was still an active medical debate about whether women could ever physically endure spaceflight someday. But Roman opened the skies to humanity in new ways without ever leaving the ground.

She earned her Ph.D. in astronomy at the University of Chicago in 1949 and worked at the Yerkes Observatory there for six years afterward. She joined the radio astronomy group at the Naval Research Laboratory, becoming the head of the microwave spectroscopy section. As she recalled in 1980 in an oral history interview with National Air and Space Museum curator David DeVorkin, when she heard that NASA might set up a space astronomy program, she wanted to lead it: “The idea of coming in with an absolutely clean slate to set up a program that I thought was likely to influence astronomy for 50 years was just a challenge that I couldn’t turn down. That’s all there is to it.” She joined NASA in 1959, just after the agency’s founding.

Roman opened the skies to humanity in new ways without ever leaving the ground.

Continue reading “Remembering Nancy Grace Roman, ‘Mother of Hubble’” »

This could be precursor to Earth’s poles swapping places.

Above our heads, something is not right. Earth’s magnetic field is in a state of dramatic weakening – and according to mind-boggling research from earlier this year, this phenomenal disruption is part of a pattern lasting for over 1,000 years.

Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t just give us our north and south poles; it’s also what protects us from solar winds and cosmic radiation – but this invisible force field is rapidly weakening, to the point scientists think it could actually flip, with our magnetic poles reversing.

Continue reading “Mysterious Anomaly Under Africa Is Weakening Earth’s Magnetic Field” »

Automation is on the right track.

The bot is helping automate mining operations Down Under.

In 2016, a mysterious illness spread inside the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, the U.S. government’s most prominent research hospital, in Bethesda, Maryland. Patients were somehow being sickened by an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria that practically never causes disease in humans. Two years later, a new study seems to finally have confirmed where this bug likely came from: the hospital’s own plumbing.

During a six-month period in 2016, six patients came down with infections caused by Sphingomonas bacteria. Four of the patients had an antibiotic-resistant strain of a particular species, Sphingomonas koreensis, which was first discovered in some of Korea’s natural mineral water spots in the early 2000s.