Lifeboat Foundation

With some blockbuster space missions underway, 2019 saw some amazing images beamed back to Earth from around the Solar System. Meanwhile, some of our most powerful telescopes were trained on the Universe’s most fascinating targets. Here are a few of the best.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been sending back stunning images of Jupiter’s clouds since it arrived in orbit around the giant planet in 2016. This amazing, colour-enhanced view shows patterns that look like they were created by paper marbling. The picture was compiled from four separate images taken by the spacecraft on 29 May.

At the time, Juno was making a close pass of the fifth world from the Sun, approaching to between 18,600km (11,600 miles) and 8,600km (5,400 miles) of the swirling cloud tops.

China launched its largest-ever rocket this week: The Long March-5 Y3 rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province, carrying a Shijian-20 satellite. The launch took place at 8:45 p.m. Beijing time on Friday night, as reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua. Just over half an hour later, the satellite achieved its planned orbit and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) declared the mission a success.

The rocket stands at 57 meters (187 feet) tall, and is 5 meters in diameter around its core stage, with four boosters each of which is 3.35 meters in diameter. This makes the Long March-5 the largest Chinese carrier rocket to date, with a total weight of 870 tonnes and producing thrust of over 1000 tonnes at takeoff.

The two-stage rocket can carry a payload of up to 25 tonnes into low Earth orbit. Alternatively, for more distant launches it can carry 14 tonnes into geostationary transfer orbit, which is an elliptical orbit that is used to reach the geosynchronous orbit which holds most satellites. Looking ahead to potential missions to the Moon and Mars, the rocket is also designed to carry up to eight tonnes into Earth-Moon transfer orbit, or up to five tones into Earth-Mars transfer orbit.

The stellar engine – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical stellar engine might look like. Via this beautiful video from Kurzgesagt, Caplan Thruster, would use the Sun’s own energy to propel it across the galaxy and beyond.

As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood.

Continue reading “Physicist Proposes Radical New ‘Stellar Engine’ That Could Move Our Entire Solar System” »

For a time 20 years ago, millions of people, including corporate chiefs and government leaders, feared that the internet was going to crash and shatter on New Year’s Eve and bring much of civilization crumbling down with it. This was all because computers around the world weren’t equipped to deal with the fact of the year 2000. Their software thought of years as two digits. When the year 99 gave way to the year 00, data would behave as if it were about the year 1900, a century before, and system upon system in an almost infinite chain of dominoes would fail. Billions were spent trying to prepare for what seemed almost inevitable.

Twenty years ago, the world feared that a technological doomsday was nigh. It wasn’t, but Y2K had a lot of prescient things to say about how we interact with tech.

We want to look & feel young again, and every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on beauty serums, cosmetic surgery, and exotic supplements in the hopes of appearing more vibrant, healthy, and desirable.

Swarms of giant drones have been flying above Colorado and Nebraska at night, perplexing both local law enforcement and the federal government.

Lithium-ion batteries are notorious for developing internal electrical shorts that can ignite a battery’s liquid electrolytes, leading to explosions and fires. Engineers at the University of Illinois have developed a solid polymer-based electrolyte that can self-heal after damage – and the material can also be recycled without the use of harsh chemicals or high temperatures.

The new study, which could help manufacturers produce recyclable, self-healing commercial batteries, is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

As lithium-ion batteries go through multiple cycles of charge and discharge, they develop tiny, branchlike structures of solid lithium called dendrites, the researchers said. These structures reduce battery life, cause hotspots, and electrical shorts, and sometimes grow large enough to puncture the internal parts of the battery, causing explosive chemical reactions between the electrodes and electrolyte liquids.

Scientists have uncovered a crucial change in cancer cells that allows them to spread around the body – by switching from sugar to fatty acids to fuel their growth.

Changing their ‘diet’ in this way allows tumour cells to set up shop at new sites where resources such as glucose – their preferred food source – are limited.

Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, found that a protein called AKR1B10 helps cells adapt the ways in which they get their energy.