Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine clothing that can warm or cool you, depending on how you’re feeling. Or artificial skin that responds to touch, temperature, and wicks away moisture automatically. Or cyborg hands controlled with DNA motors that can adjust based on signals from the outside world.

Welcome to the era of intelligent matter—an unconventional AI computing idea directly woven into the fabric of synthetic matter. Powered by brain-based computing, these materials can weave the skins of soft robots or form microswarms of drug-delivering nanobots, all while reserving power as they learn and adapt.

Sound like sci-fi? It gets weirder. The crux that’ll guide us towards intelligent matter, said Dr. W.H.P. Pernice at the University of Munster and colleagues, is a distributed “brain” across the material’s “body”— far more alien than the structure of our own minds.

An interesting new paper about alien civilizations on our level of technology which may be able to observe us. For more info, see:

Our planet’s shadow against the Sun could have been seen from thousands of nearby solar systems.

Before we send out missions to red dwarf stars, we need to double check their ability to sustain life.

Red dwarf stars are the most abundant in the universe and at the top of the list when searching for habitable planets. Why we don’t live around one?

The search for life on exoplanets takes a fairly conservative approach. It focuses on life that is similar to that of Earth.

It’s time to think beyond “Earth-like” exoplanets and turn to some truly unusual places to find alien life: the exomoons of rogue planets in the Milky Way.

Just supposing there is a God(s) ; are He/ She /It interplanetary or are we likely to experience a similar ruinous manifistation of the discord seen here on Earth as the varoius factions of ‘the Godly’. come together? If so, it may be time to start smelting down the plough-shares again.

A Rabbi, an Imam, and a Christian theologian on what life in space could mean for the spiritual.

How do stellar outbursts affect the planets that orbit them?

Scientists surveyed thousands of stars to understand the impact they have on their orbiting planets’ habitability.

Continue reading “A new understanding of young stars can help us hunt for life in space” »

There may be life in Enceladus’ deep sea plumes.

The Cassini probe revealed a subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus’ icy surface that may be habitable. A new analysis shows that the chemistry has the right stuff.

A free-floating planet (FFP) is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Centre. The presence of exomoons orbiting FFPs has been theoretically predicted by several models. Under specific conditions, these moons are able to retain an atmosphere capable of ensuring the long-term thermal stability of liquid water on their surface. We model this environment with a one-dimensional radiative-convective code coupled to a gas-phase chemical network including cosmic rays and ion-neutral reactions. We find that, under specific conditions and assuming stable orbital parameters over time, liquid water can be formed on the surface of the exomoon. The final amount of water for an Earth-mass exomoon is smaller than the amount of water in Earth oceans, but enough to host the potential development of primordial life.

Life on Mars may be freeze-dried.

But there’s a solution: freeze-dry it.

In a first-of-its-kind experiment, a team of Japanese researchers freeze-dried samples of mice sperm and sent them aboard the ISS to see how well this crucial element of human life (and, well, a lot of life on Earth) will fair against the harsh radiation of space.

Continue reading “Freeze-dried sperm: The future of space colonies is being tested on the ISS” »