Lifeboat Foundation

Meet Amun 3554. Doesn’t look like much, right? Little more than a mile wide, it’s one of the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroids yet discovered. Unless it ever decides to smash into us — a theoretical possibility, but extremely unlikely over the next few centuries — it will continue orbiting the sun, unknown and unmolested.

That is, unless Planetary Resources has its way. Planetary Resources is the asteroid-mining company launched Tuesday in Seattle, with backing from Microsoft and Google billionaires, along with the equally prominent James Cameron and Ross Perot Jr.

Continue reading “This $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company” »

NASA has released a new image depicting the most “powerful eruption” to have occurred since the Big Bang.

The explosion, which took place ten years ago, is thought to be one of the biggest to happen since the Big Bang.

Although the eruption was spotted in 2005, the latest images exposes the full power of the event.

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We’ve said it before: Mars’ moon Phobos is doomed. But a new study indicates it might be worse than we thought.

One of the most striking features we see on images of Phobos is the parallel sets of grooves on the moon’s surface.

They were originally thought to be fractures caused by an impact long ago. But scientists now say the grooves are early signs of the structural failure that will ultimately destroy this moon.

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Called the “Great Dark Lane” by the astronomers who announced it, the dusty road twists in front of the bulge of the galaxy. “For the first time, we could map this dust lane at large scales, because our new infrared maps cover the whole central region of the Milky Way,” Dante Minniti, a researcher at Universidad Andres Bello in Chile and lead author of a study describing the findings, told Space.com by email. “It is very difficult to mapthe structure of our galaxy because we are inside, and it is very large and covered with dust clouds that are opaque in the optical,” Minniti said.

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We’re NEVER gonna hear the end of it now! wink

The likely-dwarf planet adds to the mounting evidence of a dark super Earth at the outer boundary of our solar system.

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One of the weirdest aspects of quantum mechanics is entanglement, because two entangled particles affecting each other across vast distances seems to violate a fundamental principle of physics called locality: things that happen at a particular point in space can only influence the points closest to it. But what if locality — and space itself — is not so fundamental after all? Author George Musser explores the implications in his new book, Spooky Action At a Distance.

When the philosopher Jenann Ismael was ten years old, her father, an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Calgary, bought a big wooden cabinet at an auction. Rummaging through it, she came across an old kaleidoscope, and she was entranced. For hours she experimented with it and figured out how it worked. “I didn’t tell my sister when I found it, because I was scared she’d want it,” she recalls.

As you peer into a kaleidoscope and turn the tube, multicolored shapes begin to blossom, spin and merge, shifting unpredictably in seeming defiance of rational explanation, almost as if they were exerting spooky action at a distance on one another. But the more you marvel at them, the more regularity you notice in their motion. Shapes on opposite sides of your visual field change in unison, and their symmetry clues you in to what’s really going on: those shapes aren’t physical objects, but images of objects — of shards of glass that are jiggling around inside a mirrored tube.

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Going up? Attention space elevator button pushers!

A feature-length documentary called “Sky Line” is being released this month, an impressive view that follows a group of scientists and entrepreneurs as egos collide in an attempt to reach for the stars.

The film, which centers on the real-life building of the once fantastical space elevator concept, will debut at DOC NYC 2015 – America’s largest documentary festival — and will be released on all major On Demand platforms on November 20th, 2015.

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The inky black of the outer solar system just got a little brighter. A speck of light spotted in October 2015 is a rocky world more than 3 times more distant than Pluto – the farthest body in our solar system ever seen.

“We don’t know anything about its orbit,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, whose team discovered the new addition. “We just know it’s the most distant object known.”

Sheppard announced the new object, called V774104, on 10 November at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, held in National Harbor, Maryland.

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Interested in being an astronaut? NASA now hiring.

Have you ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut? Well, this could be your chance.

NASA revealed on Wednesday that it will begin accepting applications for the next class of astronaut candidates starting on Dec. 14.

Continue reading “NASA is now hiring astronauts to head up Mars mission” »