Lifeboat Foundation

Astronauts representing countries in direct armed conflict have never worked on the space station. Right now, the International Space Station crew consists of U.S. astronauts Raja Chari, Mark Vande Hei, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron; Matthias Maurer, a German from the European Space Agency; and Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov.

Economic sanctions may affect the space programs on Earth, Mastracchio says, but the space-station crews never saw the impact of anything. “The programs themselves still get along,” he says. “It was really just, we were friends before we went up to space, and you’re working up there relying on each other and you continue to do that.” Chamitoff says he wishes the world would take more notice of cooperative operations in space, which could be a better model for how to do things geopolitically. “The space station has been an amazing project that’s brought 15 countries together for 30 years,” he says. “When things like this happen and there’s these kind of tensions, you kind of wonder, ‘Does anybody notice that we’re working together and it’s going great?’”

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Continue reading “While War In Ukraine Rages Below, Astronauts Cooperate Above” »

The “Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle” has materialized from your Black Mirror nightmares.

🚨 A major breakthrough.

Scientists have successfully implanted an artificial neuron into a Venus Flytrap, in what could be a major breakthrough in the merging of living things and computers.

The neuron was able to control the plant, making its lobes close, the scientists report.

Continue reading “Scientists successfully connect ‘artificial neuron’ to biological cells in major step” »

Chinese rover Yutu-2 has discovered mysterious glass spheres on the far side of the moon. The paper detailing the discovery has been published in Science Bulletin.

“Collectively, the peculiar morphology, geometry, and local context of the glass globules are consistent with being anorthositic impact glasses,” the researchers write in their paper.

Also read | Astronomers resolve mystery of ‘cube’ spotted on Moon’s dark side.

Imagine a field of wheat that extends to the horizon, being grown for flour that will be made into bread to feed cities’ worth of people. Imagine that all authority for tilling, planting, fertilizing, monitoring and harvesting this field has been delegated to artificial intelligence: algorithms that control drip-irrigation systems, self-driving tractors and combine harvesters, clever enough to respond to the weather and the exact needs of the crop. Then imagine a hacker messes things up.

This cosmic cloud of gas and dust is about 5,000 light-years away.

“I had vowed never to sell that guitar,” Gill tells Inverse. “But I spent some more time [on astrophotography] in the last few years so I think I’ve gotten a bit more into it, and spent some more money on it.”

Gill’s latest image features a cosmic landscape of newborn stars, gas, and dust.

Continue reading “Look: Stunning new image of Rosette Nebula taken from backyard” »

Space Race 2.0 is heating up.

There’s no use denying it: Space Race 2.0 is heating up.

Continue reading “China and NASA are developing next-gen Voyager-like spacecraft. But whose is better?” »

Glass isn’t uncommon on the Moon. But these spheres are.

China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover on a mission to find out more about the far side of the Moon has made a startling new discovery. It has found mysterious glass spheres that may have captured within them important information about the Moon’s composition and history of its impact events, * Science Alert* reported.

Originally scheduled to be operational on the lunar surface for just three months, the Yutu-2 now holds the record of being the longest operational rover on the Moon. When it landed in 2019, it became the first rover to reach the far side of the Moon and has since been providing us insights about the side we cannot see from Earth. Last month, we learned that the soil on the far side is a lot stickier, and now there is the mystery of the glass spheres on the Moon aren’t a new finding. But the nature of these spheres makes them interesting and possibly a gateway for future missions.

“We saw a very large coronal mass ejection, which is a major storm on the sun,” Todd explained. “It happened on the far side, which is awfully good because it was enormous.”

Though the explosive CME is not expected to strike Earth, images captured by satellite and seismic mapping showing the sheer size of the eruption had many people talking, Todd said.

Todd said scientists estimate the flare stretched to roughly 400,000 kilometers, greater than the distance between the Earth and the Moon.