Lifeboat Foundation

In a groundbreaking experiment, NASA has successfully sent a 15-second, high-definition cat video over 19 million miles to Earth from space.

NASA has sent an ultra-high definition, 15-second-long cat video over 19 million miles (over 30 million km), the space agency said on Monday. This was not done for fun, though the video choice is undoubtedly some in-joke, but rather an experiment for its Deep Space Optical Communications. The video was beamed to Earth from its $1.2 billion Psyche asteroid probe launched in October 2023.

Continue reading “NASA sends cat video over 19 million miles using laser” »

Just four days after arriving in Earth’s orbit, China’s Shenlong space plane has been observed releasing six enigmatic “wingmen.”

China’s Shenlong (meaning “Divine Dragon”) robotic space plane has something strange four days after it arrives in Earth’s orbit.

In an unexpected move, China’s Shenlong space plane has been observed deploying 6 ‘wingmen’ objects, some of which are chatting.

Could Earth end up with a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus someday, and what could this mean for finding life on exoplanets? This is something a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers used a 3D global climate model to investigate if Earth is destined to develop a runaway greenhouse effect like the planet Venus, which precious studies speculate was once much like Earth long ago. This study holds the potential to bring awareness of the long-term consequences of climate change and what steps can be taken to mitigate the effects.

A Runaway greenhouse effect can turn a habitable planet like Earth with a surface liquid water ocean into an inhospitable planet like Venus. (Credit: Thibaut Roger / UNIGE)

“Until now, other key studies in climatology have focused solely on either the temperate state before the runaway, or either the inhabitable state post-runaway,” said Dr. Martin Turbet, who is a research scientist at CNRS laboratories of Paris and Bordeaux and a co-author on the study. “It is the first time a team has studied the transition itself with a 3D global climate model and has checked how the climate and the atmosphere evolve during that process.”

Kerry Vahala and collaborators from UC Santa Barbara have found a unique solution to an optics problem. When we last checked in with Caltech’s Kerry Vahala three years ago, his lab had recently reported the development of a new optical device called a turnkey frequency microcomb that has applications in digital communications, precision time keeping, spectroscopy, and even astronomy.

This device, fabricated on a silicon wafer, takes input laser light of one frequency and converts it into an evenly spaced set of many distinct frequencies that form a train of pulses whose length can be as short as 100 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). (The comb in the name comes from the frequencies being spaced like the teeth of a hair comb.)

Now Vahala (BS ’80, MS ’81, PhD ’85), Caltech’s Ted and Ginger Jenkins Professor of Information Science and Technology and Applied Physics and executive officer for applied physics and materials science, along with members of his research group and the group of John Bowers at UC Santa Barbara, have made a breakthrough in the way the short pulses form in an important new material called ultra-low-loss silicon nitride (ULL nitride), a compound formed of silicon and nitrogen.

The video, featuring a cat named Taters, was sent back from nearly 19 million miles away by NASA’s laser communications demonstration, marking a historic milestone.

The ultra HD footage of Taters the cat was sent as the agency tries to improve space communications.

Continue reading “NASA beams cat video from deep space with laser” »

NASA’s Perseverance rover has spent more than 1,000 days on the surface of Mars – but it’s still unearthing new details about the planet.

Most recently, it’s been shedding light on an ancient lake and river delta which could help solve fresh mysteries about the planet’s past.

Crucially, it could also reveal whether life ever existed there.

Electronics that mimic the treelike branches that form the network neurons use to communicate with each other could lead to artificial intelligence that no longer requires the megawatts of power available in the cloud. AI will then be able to run on the watts that can be drawn from the battery in a smartphone, a new study suggests.

As the brain-imitating AI systems known as neural networks grow in size and power, they are becoming more expensive and energy-hungry. For instance, to train its state-of-the-art neural network GPT-3, OpenAI spent US $4.6 million to run 9,200 GPUs for two weeks. Generating the energy that GPT-3 consumed during training released as much carbon as 1,300 cars would have spewed from their tailpipes over the same time, says study author Kwabena Boahen, a neuromorphic engineer at Stanford University, in California.

Now Boahen proposes a way for AI systems to boost the amount of information conveyed in each signal they transmit. This could reduce both the energy and space they currently demand, he says.

“This was such a big, glaring hole,” said Dr. Maria Drout. “If it turned out that these stars are rare, then our whole theoretical framework for all these different phenomena is wrong, with implications for supernovae, gravitational waves, and the light from distant galaxies. This finding shows these stars really do exist.”

Can binary stars steal material from each other? This is what a recent study published in Science hopes to address as a team of international researchers examined how the interaction between binary stars can cause one star to strip material from its companion star over time, resulting in one massive star and one much smaller star. While this study could help astronomers better understand precursor signs to supernovae, scientists have only identified one candidate for being stripped of its hydrogen material, despite longstanding hypotheses that one in three binary stars are stripped of their hydrogen.

Our sun actively produces solar flares that can impact Earth, with the strongest flares having the capacity to cause blackouts and disrupt communications—potentially on a global scale. While solar flares can be powerful, they are insignificant compared to the thousands of “super flares” observed by NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions. “Super flares” are produced by stars that are 100–10,000 times brighter than those on the sun.

The physics are thought to be the same between solar flares and super flares: a sudden release of magnetic energy. Super-flaring stars have stronger magnetic fields and thus brighter flares but some show an unusual behavior—an initial, short-lived brightness enhancement, followed by a secondary, longer-duration but less intense flare.

A team led by University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Postdoctoral Researcher Kai Yang and Associate Professor Xudong Sun developed a model to explain this phenomenon, which was published today in The Astrophysical Journal.