Lifeboat Foundation

This story may sound like the plot of a science-fiction movie.

Next year, a team of top scientists will hunker down inside a classified facility in the Nevada desert so they can experiment with a piece of advanced technology.

The test will focus on a small nuclear reactor and if it works as planned, it could be a huge step toward putting humans on Mars.

Continue reading “I-Team: Nuclear reactor test in Nevada could make a Mars trip reality” »

NASA’s Curiosity rover stumbled across a peculiar-looking metallic meteorite last week, while climbing the slopes of Mars’ Mount Sharp.

Meteorites are pretty common on the Red Planet due to its thin atmosphere and proximity to the asteroid belt. But this little meteorite is unusually smooth — almost like someone’s buffed it.

It also has several deep grooves, which suggests that it might have been molten at some point in time.

Continue reading “Curiosity Has Spotted a Weird Metallic Meteorite on Mars” »

Three astronauts landed safely in Kazakhstan on Sunday following a 115-day mission aboard the International Space Station, including US astronaut Kate Rubins, the first person to sequence DNA in space.

Russian mission control confirmed the touchdown of NASA’s Rubins, Roscosmos’ Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency at 0358 GMT.

The trio landed southeast of the Kazakh steppe town of Zhezkazgan in clear but frosty conditions after a flight from the orbital lab.

NASA’s new space-monitoring system has detected a large asteroid hurtling towards Earth, which is scheduled to pass us safely in the next few hours.

The asteroid, which was first spotted last week, is estimated to clear us with a comfortable distance of around 498,000 km (310,000 miles) — around 1.3 times further away than our Moon. But thanks to NASA’s new software, we had days rather than hours to assess and prepare for the risk.

The rock, officially named 2016 UR36, was first detected on October 25 by a telescope in Hawaii.

Continue reading “NASA’s New Warning System Has Spotted an Incoming Asteroid” »

Entire lifetimes have come and gone without the moon looking quite as large as it will this month. On November 14th, skygazers will witness the closest full moon, or “supermoon,” of 2016. But more excitingly, it’ll be the closest full moon since 1948—and we won’t get another one like it until 2034.

Where will the best real estate outside of Earth be? In this fascinating talk, The building of the most accurate space colony simulator examines the evidence that “we can do better than Mars.”

Joe Strout’s programming career began at a young age, writing articles for “Nibble” magazine in high school. Joe obtained a bachelors in psychology from the University of Miami and a masters in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, but couldn’t resist the call of code and became a full-time software developer after graduate school. He now runs a consulting business, crafting unique software solutions to a wide range of problems. Joe and his two sons have been working on High Frontier for almost a year, and ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in November 2015.

Continue reading “TedX talk making the case for orbital space colonization and speaker made the most detailed space colony simulator ever” »

Computronium is defined by some as a substance which approaches the theoretical limit of computational power that we can achieve through engineering of the matter around us. It would mean that every atom of a piece of matter would be put to useful work doing computation. Such a system would reside at the ultimate limits of efficiency, and the smallest amount of energy possible would be wasted through the generation of heat. Computronium crops up in science fiction a lot, usually as something that advanced civilizations have created, occasionally causing conflicts due to intensive harvesting of matter from their galaxy to further their processing power. The idea is also also linked with advanced machine intelligence: A block of matter which does nothing other than compute could presumably would be incredibly sought after by any artificial intelligence looking to get the most compact and powerful brain for its money!

As atoms in our bodies were made in stars millions of years ago, it’s been common to propose that we are, in fact, made of stars. Now comes news of another mind-blowing cosmic relationship as physicists conclude that human cells and neutron stars share structural similarities, which look like multi-story parking garages.

Neutron stars are quite strange space objects. They come to life as a result of supernova explosions of massive stars and are incredibly dense. While they are the smallest stars, they can pack as much mass as two Suns into a star with the radius of just 10 kilometers.

Continue reading “Humans and Supernova-Born Neutron Stars Have Similar Structures, Discover Scientists” »

The laws of thermodynamics are some of the most important principles in modern physics, because they define how three fundamental physical quantities — temperature, energy, and entropy — behave under various circumstances.

But now physicists say they’ve found a loophole in one of these laws, and it could create scenarios in which entropy — or disorder — actually decreases with time.

Thanks to modern physics, almost everything in the Universe can be explained according to two theories: general relativity for the big stuff like stars, galaxies, and the Universe itself; and quantum mechanics, for behaviours on the atomic scale.

Continue reading “Physicists might have found a way to break the Second Law of Thermodynamics” »