Lifeboat Foundation

Astronomers know of about 60 rocky exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. When they try to determine how habitable these planets might be, detecting water in their atmospheres plays a huge role. But what if there was another way of measuring the water content in these worlds?

Researchers are developing a way of modeling these worlds to determine how much water they have.

Habitability likely requires surface water, as far as we can tell. But detecting surface water is next to impossible. The next best thing is to use the tools we have—like the James Webb Space Telescope—to detect and characterize exoplanet atmospheres. But despite the JWST’s power, it can’t examine every exoplanet atmosphere. Some are beyond its reach. But one team of researchers is using what we do know about exoplanets, tidal heating, and radiogenic heating to try to determine which exoplanets might have oceans, either on the surface or under the surface.

Scientists have developed a model to better understand the physics of the powerful superflares emitted by stars far beyond our solar system.

Solar flares, which are rapid and strong bursts of energy and radiation that originate from the Sun’s surface, are known to be emitted into space by our Sun.

NASA’s Kepler and TESS missions, however, have discovered several stars may produce superflares that are 100–10,000 times brighter than those emitted by our Sun.

The mainstay material of electronics is now yielding better energy storage.

The material developed by researchers in Panama uses a mixture of newspaper, rice husk, borax, and glue.

Bilanol/iStock.

The construction industry ranks as the second-largest consumer of plastic globally, contributing to over a third of greenhouse gas emissions associated with energy usage worldwide. The manufacturing procedures involved in producing construction materials have detrimental effects on air, land, and water quality.

Continue reading “Scientists turn rise husk, recycled newspaper into thermal insulation” »

Optical scientists have found a new way to significantly increase the power of fibre lasers while maintaining their beam quality, making them a future key defence technology against low-cost drones and for use in other applications such as remote sensing.

Researchers from the University of South Australia (UniSA), the University of Adelaide (UoA) and Yale University have demonstrated the potential use of multimode optical fibre to scale up power in fibre lasers by three-to-nine times but without deteriorating the beam quality so that it can focus on distant targets.

The breakthrough is published in Nature Communications.

Tesla has secured a massive Megapack order for a new giant energy storage project that will likely become the largest in the world.

The project in question is the Melbourne Renewable Energy Hub (MREH), which is located just outside of Melbourne.

When completed, it will consist of three battery systems totaling 600 MW/1.6 GWh of capacity.

Researchers are claiming a breakthrough in quantum communications, thanks to a new diamond-stretching technique they say greatly increases the temperatures at which qubits remain entangled, while also making them microwave-controllable.

Quantum networking is an emerging field that uses weird quantum phenomena to send and receive information. These networks will be impossible to hack, and will use quantum entanglement to cover large distances, creating pairs of qubits which mirror each other’s quantum state without any physical connection.

Diamond-based qubits are capable of maintaining their state of entanglement for a decent length of time – but only provided they’re kept incredibly cold – just a hair above absolute zero. That limits their usefulness, because it’d mean you’d need a giant, energy-intensive cooling apparatus at every node of your quantum network.

The authors present a series of correlated insulating states of twisted bilayer graphene that is detected using an atomic force microscope tip. An additional experiment demonstrates the coupling of a mechanical oscillator to a quantum device.

The network’s total capacity will surpass 500 Gbps by 2025.

While China is already marching ahead with its internet infrastructure, the country has announced the completion of its first high-orbit satellite communication network, which aims to provide fast and reliable internet service within its territory and to several countries along its Belt and Road initiative.

The network, which consists of three high-throughput satellites named ChinaSat 16, 19, and 26, is expected to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, a low-orbit satellite system developed by the American aerospace company, according to a Beijing-based communications expert.

Continue reading “China soars Starlink-challenger satellite network to counter Elon Musk” »