Lifeboat Foundation

After publishers sued Sci-Hub, Russian ISPs are now preventing users from accessing the valuable scientific data repository and paywall killer.

Uncovering forgotten history can help explain why science still has a masculine bias today.

Meet the Indian-American star of Brainchild.

Very excited to join IdeaXme (http://radioideaxme.com/) as Longevity Ambassador, utilizing this wonderful media platform to help expand global awareness of the people engineering a future free of aging, disease, degeneration, and suffering.

Robotic refueling. 3D Forest imagery. And two student experiments inspired by Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.” These are just a few of the studies that will be added to the hundreds onboard the International Space Station with the SpaceX cargo launch on Dec. 4! Watch more:

As a SciFri holiday tradition, we present highlights from the 28th first annual Ig Nobel Awards ceremony.

Scientists can’t study what they can’t measure — as David Muller knows only too well. An applied physicist, Muller has been grappling for years with the limitations of the best imaging tools available as he seeks to probe materials at the atomic scale.

One particularly vexing quarry has been ultra-thin layers of the material molybdenum disulfide, which show promise for building thin, flexible electronics. Muller and his colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have spent years peering at MoS₂ samples under an electron microscope to discern their atomic structures. The problem was seeing the sulfur atoms clearly, Muller says. Raising the energy of the electron beam would sharpen the image, but knock atoms out of the MoS₂ sheet in the process. Anyone hoping to say something definitive about defects in the structure would have to guess. “It would take a lot of courage, and maybe half the time, you’d be right,” he says.

This July, Muller’s team reported a breakthrough. Using an ultra-sensitive detector that the researchers had created and a special method for reconstructing the data, they resolved features in MoS₂ down to 0.39 angstroms, two and a half times better than a conventional electron microscope would achieve. (1 Å is one-tenth of a nanometre, and a common measure of atomic bond lengths.) At once, formerly fuzzy sulfur atoms now showed up clearly — and so did ‘holes’ where they were absent. Ordinary electron microscopy is “like flying propeller planes”, Muller says. “Now we have a jet.”

Continue reading “The microscope revolution that’s sweeping through materials science” »

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NASA’s Rocket Science in 60 Seconds gives you an inside look at work being done to explore deep space. In the latest episode you can hear Rob Stough, payload utilization manager for our NASA’s Space Launch System, talk about the power we needed to boost the rocket into space and send NASA’s Orion Spacecraft to the Moon. Watch: https://youtu.be/0VB9aI3xVFs

Apps can turn your smartphone into a scientific instrument. These programs let you spot birds, identify stars, learn about the elements, and more.