Lifeboat Foundation

Somewhere in the outer reaches of the Solar System, beyond the orbit of Neptune, something wonky is happening. A few objects are orbiting differently from everything else, and we don’t know why.

A popular hypothesis is that an unseen object called Planet Nine could be messing with these orbits; astronomers are avidly searching for this planet. But earlier this year physicists came up with an alternative explanation they think is more plausible.

Continue reading “Something’s Hiding in Our Outer Solar System, But It Might Not Be Planet Nine” »

Thanks to a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, scientists are able to read patterns on long chains of molecules to understand and predict behavior of disordered strands of proteins and polymers. The results could, among other things, pave the way to develop new materials from synthetic polymers.

The lab of Charles Sing, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Illinois, provided the theory behind the discovery, which was then verified through experiments conducted in the lab of Sarah Perry, assistant professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, and Illinois alumna. The collaborators detailed their findings in a paper titled “Designing Electrostatic Interactions via Polyelectrolyte Monomer Sequence” published in ACS (American Chemical Society) Central Science.

The colleagues set out to understand the physics behind the precise sequence of charged monomers along the chain and how it affects the polymer’s ability to create self-assembling liquid materials called complex coacervates.

Continue reading “Researchers can now predict properties of disordered polymers” »

The biggest, most expensive science experiment in the world might be losing all its dark matter. But physicists are looking on the bright side.

Neutron stars are born after supernovas, an implosion that compresses an object the size of the sun to about the size of Montreal, making them “a hundred trillion times denser than anything on earth.” Their immense gravity makes their outer layers freeze solid, making them similar to earth with a thin crust enveloping a liquid core.

This will help provide better understand gravitational waves like those detected last year when two neutron stars collided. The new results even suggest that lone neutron stars might generate small gravitational waves.

Could Tony Stark’s arc reactor exist in real life? Probably not, but Gizmodo’s Ryan Carlyle made a valiant attempt to explain an almost realistic version of the science behind it. As a disclaimer, he warns, “Now, I’m mixing real science and fake science here. So physics nerds and comic-book nerds: Deal with it.”

Relativity Space is working to 3D print the Terran 1 rocket in 60 days using laser printing and direct energy deposition. They will have a test flight in 2020 and will have commercial flights in 2021.

They use proprietary materials which are custom designed for printing. They are using stronger alloys designed to take advantage of Stargate’s printing physics. They have highly reliable materials for printing rocket structures and are using an in-house metallurgy and material characterization lab.

Terran 1 Baseline:

Continue reading “Fully 3D Printed Rocket Engine in Just 3 Parts and Full Printed Rocket in 60 Days” »

My name is Sarah Lim and I am the US Transhumanist Party’s Singaporean ambassador. I have been repeatedly trying to reach you over the course of the last few months, but I understand that you are a very busy man who’s doing a lot of great things and propelling the Singularity forward.

Like you and Andres Gomez Emilsson, I’m in the very small minority of transhumanists with an avid interest in non-local consciousness and psi research.

I’ve watched your video, “Wild-Ass Sh*t: Consciousness and Psi from a Euryphysics Perspective” four times in a row, to date. I’ve read up extensively on the PEAR Lab experiments, and I’m a friend of Jim Matlock’s as well. I’ve also read and re-read “Physicists Rediscover Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields … and my Morphic Pilot Wave …” five times, to date.

Continue reading “An Open Letter to Ben Goertzel” »

For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic turbulence to a highly structured pattern was observed by many scientists, but never understood.

At EPFL’s Emerging Complexity in Physical Systems Laboratory, Tobias Schneider and his team have identified the mechanism that explains this phenomenon. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications.

“Time is a moving image of eternity.” –Plato.

TIME, the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked, has remained an elusive notion over the ages. Sages, philosophers and scientists have ventured a countless number of times into the dark arena of the hourglass in an attempt to tame the indomitable vortex of this indefinite stream.