Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers have come up with an ‘acoustic metamaterial’ that cancels sound.

Putting the entire ocean system at risk.

🔎 Learn more about overfishing: https://wef.ch/2KM97Be

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, to the future.^[1][2][3] Time is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to compare the duration of events or the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change of quantities in material reality or in the conscious experience.^[4][5][6][7] Time is often referred to as a fourth dimension, along with three spatial dimensions.^[8]

Time has long been an important subject of study in religion, philosophy, and science, but defining it in a manner applicable to all fields without circularity has consistently eluded scholars.^{[2][6][7][9][10][11]} Nevertheless, diverse fields such as business, industry, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems.^[12][13][14]

Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as “what a clock reads”.^[6][15][16] See Units of Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.^[17] An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life.

Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe made a “perfect” touchdown Thursday on a distant asteroid, collecting samples from beneath the surface in an unprecedented mission that could shed light on the origins of the solar system.

“We’ve collected a part of the solar system’s history,” project manager Yuichi Tsuda said at a jubilant press conference hours after the successful landing was confirmed.

“We have never gathered sub-surface material from a celestial body further away than the Moon,” he added.

Japanese spacecraft landed on the asteroid surface.

Hayabusa2 has collected a second sample from the asteroid’s surface. It could give us a unique insight into how the early solar system was formed.

The procedure: After a few hours of maneuvering, the spacecraft touched down on Ryugu’s surface at 9:15 p.m. US Eastern time yesterday. It then fired a bullet into the asteroid and collected some of the debris stirred up by the shot. The Japanese space agency JAXA tweeted that the mission had been a success and that the space probe had now left the surface again. It’s the second sampling mission after a similar one in April, and it required particularly careful preparations, because any problems could cause the materials gathered during the first operation to be lost. In April, Hayabusa2 had also fired a copper bomb into the asteroid’s surface to expose the rocks beneath, in anticipation of today’s mission.

Continue reading “A Japanese spacecraft just grabbed more rocks from the asteroid Ryugu” »

Carbon dioxide is kind of painted as the villain of the 21st century, and it’s not enough to just reduce our emissions now – we need to remove some of what’s already in the atmosphere. Now, researchers at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a simple way to turn the troublesome gas into a useful resource by converting it into the “wonder” material graphene.

Enhanced electric fields at curved carbon structures makes them better catalysts.

Humans have generated nearly 10 billion tons of plastic in the last 70 years (via NowThis)

For many, it’s the material of nightmares: machines capable of continuously refining themselves. What if they turn malevolent? Will they enslave humanity? Fortunately, given the current status of machine learning research, we will not have to worry about such a scenario for quite some time.