Lifeboat Foundation

Physics meets machine learning.

The Progress and Promise for Science in Indonesia Regional Special Feature focuses on biodiversity and climate change, highlighting research based on the unique geology and biology of a nation comprising more than 17,600 islands, containing about 10 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests, and home to over 300,000 species of wildlife.

Join my mailing list https://briankeating.com/list to win a real 4 billion year old meteorite! All.edu emails in the USA 🇺🇸 will WIN!Is the universe twice as old as we thought?Current estimates suggest that the Big Bang occurred 13.8 billion years ago. But today, we’re joined by Rajendra Gupta, a luminary in the field of cosmology who claims that the universe is actually 26.7 billion years old. I’ve invited him on the show so he can make a case for his claims!Professor Gupta is a theoretical physicist currently teaching astrophysics to senior undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on astrophysics, cosmology, general relativity, the dynamics of the universe under evolutionary physical constants beyond the standard model, CMB, JWST, BAO, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the large-scale structure and formation of galaxies, dark matter, and dark energy. To say I am thrilled to have him on the show for the second time would be an understatement. So, without further ado, let’s jump right in! Key Takeaways:

00:00 Intro.

01:50 Judging Rajendra’s paper.

Hausjärvi, FINLAND— A Chinese launch of the joint Sino-French SVOM mission to study Gamma-ray bursts early Saturday saw toxic rocket debris fall over a populated area.

A Long March 2C rocket lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 3:00 a.m. Eastern (0700 UTC) June 22, sending the Space Variable Objects Monitor (SVOM) mission satellite into orbit.

The launch was declared successful by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) a short time after liftoff.

Researchers have made significant progress in understanding the transfer of neutrons in weakly bound nuclei. The experiment, performed at Legnaro National Laboratory, focused on the one-neutron stripping process in reactions involving lithium-6 and bismuth-209. The work is published in the journal Nuclear Science and Techniques.

Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We’re in no position to eliminate the possibility. But if our distant descendants ever do, it won’t involve dilithium crystals, and Scottish accents will have evaporated into history by then.

Try Opera browser FOR FREE here https://opr.as/04-Opera-browser-sabinehossenfelderDark Energy is the name that astrophysicists have given to what ever acceler…

One of the main scientific objectives of next-generation observatories (like the James Webb Space Telescope) has been to observe the first galaxies in the Universe – those that existed at Cosmic Dawn. This period is when the first stars, galaxies, and black holes in our Universe formed, roughly 50 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. By examining how these galaxies formed and evolved during the earliest cosmological periods, astronomers will have a complete picture of how the Universe has changed with time.

As addressed in previous articles, the results of Webb’s most distant observations have turned up a few surprises. In addition to revealing that galaxies formed rapidly in the early Universe, astronomers also noticed these galaxies had particularly massive supermassive black holes (SMBH) at their centers. This was particularly confounding since, according to conventional models, these galaxies and black holes didn’t have enough time to form. In a recent study, a team led by Penn State astronomers has developed a model that could explain how SMBHs grew so quickly in the early Universe.

The research team was led by W. Niel Brandt, the Eberly Family Chair Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science. Their research is described in two papers presented at the 244th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS224), which took place from June 9th to June 13th in Madison, Wisconsin. Their first paper, “Mapping the Growth of Supermassive Black Holes as a Function of Galaxy Stellar Mass and Redshift,” appeared on March 29th in The Astrophysical Journal, while the second is pending publication. Fan Zou, an Eberly College graduate student, was the lead author of both papers.

‘Assembly theory’ aims to explain evolution without biology. Is it a dazzling breakthrough or an attempt to answer questions nobody asked?

A future space observatory could use exo-eclipses to tease out exomoon populations.

If you’re like us, you’re still coming down from the celestial euphoria that was last month’s total solar eclipse. The spectacle of the moon blocking out the sun has also provided astronomers with unique scientific opportunities in the past, from the discovery of helium to proof for general relativity. Now, eclipses in remote exoplanetary systems could aid in the hunt for elusive exomoons.

A recent study out of the University of Michigan in partnership with Johns Hopkins APL and the Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled “Exomoons & Exorings with the Habitable Worlds Observatory I: On the Detection of Earth-Moon Analog Shadows & Eclipses,” posted to the arXiv preprint server, looks to use a future mission to hunt for eclipses, transits and occultations in distant systems.