Lifeboat Foundation

Light sails can later use space-dust braking Richard Bizley/Science Photo Library By James Romero Our galaxy may contain billions of habitable worlds that don’t host any life. Should we attempt to change that? Breakthrough Starshot is a project with ambitious aims to use such systems to send tiny, lightweight probes to Alpha Centauri. The goal is to take pictures of our nearest star, but these systems could also deliver much larger payloads into orbit around nearby stars, says Gros. Potential targets include the planetary system around TRAPPIST-1, a red dwarf star just 40 light years away…

Printed plastic solar cells should be able to harvest enough energy from indoor light to power your phone within the next few months.

The effort to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics always hits one snag: gravity. An experiment could finally tell us if it is a quantum force.

This huge shiny cube is just a 1/20th scale model of the planned DUNE neutrino detector. It will be filled with liquid argon to catch these elusive particles.

Can spot quantum errors IBM research By Mark Kim What good is a fast computer if you can’t trust it? Thanks to half a century of research on getting computers to do their job correctly even in the presence of mechanical errors, our modern machines tend to be pretty reliable. Unfortunately, the laws of sheer complexity of which leaves them prone to errors. Now, we finally have the first demonstration of a quantum program that can detect data corruption.

We’ve taken the first pictures of neutron stars colliding 130 million light years away. The resulting gravitational waves may solve some big cosmic mysteries.

Traffic noise has many frequencies, making it hard to suppress. A new barrier with movable folds can change its acoustic properties in response to traffic patterns.

Using a jet of radio waves, astronomers have begun to map the other side of the Milky Way. Within 10 years we could have a complete map of the entire galaxy.

Tesla released a new update to its mobile app to include some new cold weather convenience features when combined with its latest car software update.