Lifeboat Foundation

Covering interstellar distances in a human lifetime is far from easy. Going at 1 percent of the speed of light, it would take over 400 years to reach the closest star, and we have not been able to propel any spacecraft even close to that speed. But a new method aims to get to those speeds and maybe more – and it takes inspiration from the mighty albatross.

Chemical propulsion can be very useful in achieving high speeds pretty quickly, but there’s the drawback in that you need to carry the fuel with you, which means you need to be able to generate more thrust to shift the extra fuel and so on. It’s a huge issue when it comes to rocket science. A realistic alternative is ion propulsion, used to slowly and successfully maneuver the Dawn spacecraft, but it would take an equally long time to reach enough speed with such a steady but small acceleration.

Solar sails hold a more intriguing possible approach. Proposals such as the Breakthrough Starshot see lasers used to massively accelerate a spacecraft the size of a credit card to one-fifth the speed of light. But, you need to build a very powerful laser. A similar method using sunlight might also work, although not up to such a high speed.

But a team including Zhang has a suggestion for what might have caused it: the merger of a neutron star not with another neutron star, as is common for short gamma ray bursts, but with a white dwarf. White dwarfs are larger than neutron stars, but not nearly as big as the massive stars that cause supernovae, which would account for the length and intensity of the unusual burst.

Since there are lots of white dwarf-neutron star binaries and events like this are rare enough that it’s the first to be observed in half a century of looking, he suggests it needs some qualifications: first, the white dwarf needs to be “close to the upper mass limit,” and afterwards the two need to merge into a rapidly-spinning magnetar, which would “inject additional energy into the kilonova.”

The success of The Merge concept may now serve as a roadmap to enable a switch from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake in Bitcoin.

Ethereum, the world’s second-largest crypto asset by market cap, has drastically changed its energy usage, saving a country-size proportion of power consumption.

This radical update most likely reduced the power consumption of the crypto network by 99.84 percent to 9.99 percent, according to a paper published by peer-reviewed data-science journal Patterns on Tuesday.

The company claims the aerial vehicle can top any regular airliner.

The five-seater VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) Ranger, developed by Aura Aerospace, claims to fly farther than any typical airliner and boasts roof-to-roof vertical takeoff and landing capability.

Aura’s plan for doing this is quite straightforward. An octocopter system with eight 70-inch (178-cm) two-blade props hanging fore and aft of the enormous main wing is used to achieve vertical takeoff and landing. A pair of turbofan jet engines start-up to give forward power once the vehicle is in the air and the wing has folded out to its full 75-ft (23-meter) width. This system brings you onto and off of the landing pad.

Researchers around the world are on a mission to relieve a bottleneck in the clean energy revolution: batteries. From electric vehicles to renewable grid-scale energy storage, batteries are at the heart of society’s most crucial green innovations—but they need to pack more energy to make these technologies widespread and practical.

Now, a team of scientists led by chemists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has unraveled the complex chemical mechanisms of a battery component that is crucial for boosting energy density: the interphase. Their work published today in Nature Nanotechnology.

The Orion spacecraft had a brief power issue on Sunday (Dec. 4) but did complete its planned engine burn to return home as planned today (Dec. 5).

Adamkaz/iStock.

A desert at Guelmim Oued Noun in central Morocco will primarily play host to the Morocco-UK Power Project, which aims to develop 10.5GW of renewable energy from solar and wind power, of which 3.6GW would be supplied to the UK, for an average of 20+ hours a day.

Europe just set a $60 price cap on Moscow’s oil — so the Russian president has “basically destroyed his most important market,” Dan Yergin said.

Although oxygen is now the most abundant element in our oceans and our atmosphere, comprising about 88.8 percent and 23.1 percent of the mass of the two, respectively, this wasn’t always the case. In actuality, the abundance of oxygen on Earth arose only 2.4 billion years ago thanks to the advent of photosynthesis, the process through which some of the first life-forms transformed sunlight into energy. It was only coincidence, scientists say, that one of the products of this process was oxygen. But it also would go on to completely transform the planet, creating the conditions for increasingly complex forms of life.

For all the importance of this so-called “Great Oxidation Event,” scientists have always wondered about the presence of oxygen on the planet prior to the emergence of photosynthesis.