Lifeboat Foundation

Common push puppet toys in the shapes of animals and popular figures can move or collapse with the push of a button at the bottom of the toys’ base. Now, a team of UCLA engineers has created a new class of tunable dynamic material that mimics the inner workings of push puppets, with applications for soft robotics, reconfigurable architectures and space engineering.

Inside a push puppet, there are connecting cords that—when pulled taut—will make the toy stand stiff. But by loosening these cords, the “limbs” of the toy will go limp. Using the same cord tension-based principle that controls a puppet, researchers have developed a new type of metamaterial, a material engineered to possess properties with promising advanced capabilities.

Continue reading “Engineers make tunable, shape-changing metamaterial inspired by vintage toys” »

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Continue reading “Battlefleets: In the future, fleets of unimaginable scope may battle over light years, in conflicts that might last milliseconds or entire centuries” »

“This breakthrough enhances astronaut safety and makes long-term Mars missions a more realistic possibility,” said Dr. Dimitra Atri.

How will future Mars astronauts shield themselves from harmful space radiation? This is what a recent study published in The European Physical Journal Plus hopes to address as a pair of international researchers investigated what materials could be suited for providing the necessary shielding against solar and cosmic rays that could harm future Mars astronauts. This study holds the potential to help scientists and engineers better understand the mitigation measures that need to be taken to protect astronauts during long-term space missions.

For the study, the researchers used computer simulations to create Mars-like conditions, whose surface temperatures and pressures are much smaller than Earth’s, along with Mars completely lacking a protective magnetic field that provides our planet with protection from space radiation. Through this, the researchers tested a variety of materials to ascertain their effectiveness in shielding astronauts from space radiation.

Continue reading “New Materials Identified for Protecting Astronauts from Mars Radiation” »

There are two different ways to measure the expansion rate of the Universe, and they don’t agree. And no, new measurements don’t help.

Most of a planet’s water is generally not on its surface but hidden deep in its interior. This affects the potential habitability of distant worlds, as shown by model calculations of researchers at ETH Zurich and Princeton University.

Using the CHARA Array at Georgia State University, researchers have unveiled new insights into Polaris, the North Star.

Known for its role in navigation and as the brightest in a triple-star system, Polaris has now been observed in greater detail, revealing its size to be 46 times that of the Sun and showcasing large surface spots. These findings are crucial for using Cepheids as cosmic yardsticks, aiding in the measurement of cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe.

Researchers using Georgia State University’s Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) Array have identified new details about the size and appearance of the North Star, also known as Polaris. The new research was published on August 20 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Scientists say there’s a 50/50 chance that our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. Would you take those odds?

An exploration of new work done at Arecibo regarding the infamous Wow! Signal of 1977 that seems to account for all aspects of the observed signal but turned out to be a very strange natural event that isn’t likely to repeat often that is analogous to a lightning flash in a hydrogen cloud in interstellar space.

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Continue reading “The Wow Signal Potentially Explained … and it’s Weird” »

Researchers using China’s FAST telescope have uncovered six distant galaxies rich in hydrogen and star-forming potential, significantly advancing our understanding of the early universe.

Dr. Hongwei Xi from the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) and his team have discovered the characteristics of six newly identified high-redshift galaxies. This discovery was made using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) located in Guizhou Province, China. Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

These remarkable galaxies, whose radio wave emissions have taken almost the age of the solar system to reach us, contain amounts of atomic hydrogen gas that are more than that of the tens of thousands of galaxies previously surveyed in the local universe using other radio telescopes.