Lifeboat Foundation

In the 1995 post-apocalyptic action film “Waterworld” Earth’s polar ice caps have completely melted, and the sea level has risen to over 5 miles, covering nearly all of the land. Astronomers have uncovered a pair of planets that are true “water worlds,” unlike any planet found in our solar system.

Slightly larger than Earth, they don’t have the density of rock. And yet, they are denser than the gas-giant outer planets orbiting our Sun. So, what are they made of? The best answer is that these exoplanets have global oceans at least 500 times deeper than the average depth of Earth’s oceans, which simply are a wet veneer on a rocky ball.

Continue reading “NASA Discovers Pair of Super-Earths With 1,000-Mile-Deep Oceans” »

Even though winds on Mars are weak, they could be sufficient to provide power.

Nature Publishing:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01851-4

The next breakthrough to take the AI world by storm might be 3D model generators. This week, OpenAI open sourced Point-E, a machine learning system that creates a 3D object given a text prompt. According to a paper published alongside the code base, Point-E can produce 3D models in one to two minutes on a single Nvidia V100 GPU.

Point-E doesn’t create 3D objects in the traditional sense. Rather, it generates point clouds, or discrete sets of data points in space that represent a 3D shape — hence the cheeky abbreviation. (The “E” in Point-E is short for “efficiency,” because it’s ostensibly faster than previous 3D object generation approaches.) Point clouds are easier to synthesize from a computational standpoint, but they don’t capture an object’s fine-grained shape or texture — a key limitation of Point-E currently.

To get around this limitation, the Point-E team trained an additional AI system to convert Point-E’s point clouds to meshes. (Meshes — the collections of vertices, edges and faces that define an object — are commonly used in 3D modeling and design.) But they note in the paper that the model can sometimes miss certain parts of objects, resulting in blocky or distorted shapes.

Equipmake says it’s got the lightest and most power-dense electric motor on the market, and if there’s one place where weight is critical, it’s on a launch pad. The company has developed an ultra-lightweight motor for Australia’s first rocket launch.

Queensland-based Gilmour Space Technologies is on the home stretch making preparations for the launch of its three-stage Eris orbital launch vehicle next April. It’ll be the first orbital launch attempt of an Australian designed and built rocket, and the company hopes it’ll represent the beginning of a new space launch industry Down Under.

Continue reading “Ultra-light electric motor to feed Australia’s first home-grown rocket” »

That does not mean the planet did not have life.

A new experimental study conducted by Washington University in St. Louis is defeating any hope that scientists have had that atmospheric oxygen once existed on the Red Planet, according to a press release by the institution published on Thursday.

Instead, the scientists have found that under Mars-like conditions, manganese oxides can be readily formed without any presence of atmospheric oxygen.

Continue reading “Ancient Mars did not have atmospheric oxygen, claims new research” »

“Seeing our first sample on the ground is a great capstone to our prime mission period, which ends on Jan. 6.”

NASA’S Perseverance Mars rover has dropped its first rock sample on the Red Planet’s surface. A titanium tube containing a rock sample on December 21 that was deposited on the surface of Mars is likely to be the first sample that could return to Earth. The event marks a “historic” step in the Mars Sample Return campaign.

Continue reading “NASA’s Perseverance rover drops first sample on Mars, to return it to Earth one day” »

In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.

No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.

As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?

It’s a monumental head-scratcher known as the ‘grandfather paradox’, but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to “square the numbers” to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.

A smattering of stars scattered throughout the center of the Milky Way is the remnants of the ancient galactic core, when our galaxy was still new.

Using measurements from the most accurate three-dimensional map of the galaxy ever compiled, as well as a neural network to probe the chemical compositions of over 2 million stars, a team of astronomers have identified 18,000 stars from our galaxy’s infancy, when it was just a compact collection of proto-galaxies coming together to dream of bigger things.

Hints of this stellar population have been identified in previous studies.