Lifeboat Foundation

It’s taken nearly 20 years but Sir Richard Branson is finally taking paying passengers to space.

A group of Chinese scientists has recently found key evidence for the existence of nanohertz gravitational waves, marking a new era in nanohertz gravitational wave research. The research was based on pulsar timing observations carried out with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST).

The research was conducted by the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array (CPTA) collaboration, which comprises researchers from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and other institutes. Their findings were published online June 28 in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA).

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Serious Safety Questions about the first paying space tourism flight of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo while wishing them the best.

Congratulations to Virgin Galactic for a successful mission today! I looked great! But there are still serious safety questions about the missions going forward about paying space tourism flights on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. I do wish Virgin Galactic the best on their venture going forward!

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It’s official. There’s something out there shaking the stars in a way that can no longer be ascribed to chance.

Several teams around the world have independently found a signal in the timing of flashing stars called pulsars that points to giant, long-wavelength gravitational waves rolling through the galaxy. It’s not quite a detection of those gravitational waves yet – but there is more than a 99 percent chance that what we’re looking at is something significant.

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The claim of a gravitational wave background suggests the universe is constantly roiled by violent events that happened over the past 13 billion years.

A case of wine was put on the line.

This is according to a report by Science Alert published on Tuesday.

A 25-year-old wager on the source of consciousness between German-American computational neuroscientist Christof Koch and Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers has come to a close with the first one admitting defeat.

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Developing The Low Earth Orbit Economy On The World’s First Commercial Space Station — David Zuniga, Senior Director, In-Space Solutions, Axiom Space

David Zuniga is Senior Director of In-Space Solutions at Axiom Space (https://www.axiomspace.com/), a space infrastructure developer headquartered in Houston, Texas, which plans human spaceflight for government-funded and commercial astronauts, engaging in in-space research, in-space manufacturing, and space exploration. The company aims to own and operate the world’s first commercial space station, and Mr. Zuniga helps to develop strategy and growth around Axiom’s Low Earth Orbit (LEO) economy, also playing a critical role in business and technical integration of Axiom’s in-space manufacturing and research capabilities for Axiom Station architecture.

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Researchers in Japan and Australia have developed a new multicore optic fiber able to transmit a record-breaking 1.7 petabits per second, while maintaining compatibility with existing fiber infrastructure. The team–from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and Sumitomo Electric Industries, and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia—achieved the feat using a fiber with 19 cores. That’s the largest number of cores packed into a cable with a standard cladding diameter of 0.125 micrometers.

“We believe 19 cores is the highest practical number of cores or spatial channels you can have in standard cladding diameter fiber and still maintain good quality transmission,” says Georg Rademacher, who previously headed the project for NICT but who has recently returned to Germany to take up a directorship in optical communications at the University of Stuttgart.

Most fiber cables for long-distance transmission in use today are single core, single-mode glass fibers (SMF). But SMF is approaching its practical limit as network traffic rapidly increases because of AI, cloud computing, and IoT applications. Many researchers are therefore taking an interest in multicore fiber in conjunction with space-division multiplexing (SDM), a transmission technique for using multiple spatial channels in a cable.

Scientists using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study the protoplanetary disk around a young star have discovered the most compelling chemical evidence to date of the formation of protoplanets. The discovery will provide astronomers with an alternate method for detecting and characterizing protoplanets when direct observations or imaging are not possible. The results will be published in an upcoming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

HD 169,142 is a young star located in the constellation Sagittarius that is of significant interest to astronomers due to the presence of its large, dust-and gas-rich circumstellar disk that is viewed nearly face-on. Several protoplanet candidates have been identified over the last decade, and earlier this year, scientists at the University of Liège and Monash University confirmed that one such candidate—HD 169,142 b—is, in fact, a giant Jupiter-like protoplanet.

The discoveries revealed in a new analysis of archival data from ALMA—an international collaboration in which the National Science Foundation’s National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a member—may now make it easier for scientists to detect, confirm, and ultimately characterize, protoplanets forming around young stars.