Lifeboat Foundation

Blue supergiants are the rock-and-roll stars of the universe. They are massive stars that live fast and die young which makes them rare and difficult to study, even with modern telescopes.

Before space telescopes, few blue supergiants had been observed, so our knowledge of these stars was limited.

Leading astrophysicist Dr. Tamara Rogers, from Newcastle University, UK, and her team have been working for the past five years to create simulations of stars like these to try to predict what it is that makes the surface appear the way it does.

Continue reading “Secrets of the ‘blue supergiant’ revealed” »

NASA is sending fan-propelled robotic “bees” into space to do chores for astronauts 🚀 🐝.

Like other previous claims, this one may not hold up.

A cataclysmic collision between a pair of dead stars may have seeded our solar system with precious heavy metals including gold and uranium, according to a newly published study. If such an event were to be observed in the present day, it would be the brightest point in the night sky.

Thankfully, it’s unlikely the solar array could be weaponized into an orbiting “death ray”.

SpiNNaker was built under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber at The University of Manchester, a principal designer of two products that earned the Queen’s Award for Technology —the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, and the BBC Microcomputer.

“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.” — Professor Steve Furber, The University of Manchester

Inspired by the human brain, the SpiNNaker is capable of sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously. The SpiNNaker has a staggering 1 million processors that are able to perform over 200 million actions per second.

Continue reading “We’ve found an icy new super-Earth that’s orbiting our closest single star” »

While the International Space Station was traveling over the north Atlantic Ocean, astronauts David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Nick Hague of NASA grappled Dragon at 7:01 a.m. EDT using the space station’s robotic arm Canadarm2. go.nasa.gov/2WmNrki

Spaceflight — in addition to being awesome — causes significant changes in the human immune system. We are careful with our astronauts so they don’t get sick during spaceflight, but we need to ensure their immune systems are strong when they start embarking on longer trips. Learn about the latest International Space Station research: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/rr-…y-in-space

A star’s stellar endgame may offer astrobiologists a rare opportunity to remotely detect surface life on far-flung extrasolar moons.