Lifeboat Foundation

The moon has three large seas and a number of smaller lakes connected by rivers and rivulets located in its northern hemisphere, and one large lake in the south. NASA researchers previously believed the liquid to be ethane, which is produced when “sunlight breaks methane molecules apart”, said Alice Le Gall, a member of the Cassini radar team who led the study into the makeup of the moon’s liquid reservoirs.

Using radar observations of the heat given off by Ligeia Mare, as well as data from a 2013 experiment that bounced radio signals off of the sea, the team determined the compositions of the liquid sea and the sea bed by separating each of their contributions to the sea’s observed temperature.

This image from Cassini shows Ligeia Mare, the second largest known body of liquid on Titan.

Continue reading “Cassini discovers that lake on Saturn’s moon is liquid methane” »

Shining a laser onto a microscopic object coated with a superfluid film induces flows that can generate a controlled force.

Economist Robin Hanson says we’re on the brink of a strange new era. Read an excerpt of “The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth” below.

Eugene Sergeev / Shutterstock.

What will the next great era be like, after the eras of foraging, farming, and industry?

My new article for Newsweek on the future of transhumanist civil rights:

Transhumanists like presidential candidate Zoltan Istvan believe a new civil rights age is looming.

“Imagine if you were in a zoo, and there was a lion on the other side of the glass that you could have the sensation of touching.”

A DOCTOR who has dedicated his work to the quest for eternal life insists the record for the oldest living person will soon fall and someone already alive will keep going until they make 1,000.

Stanford’s OceanOne uses haptic feedback to let human pilots safely explore the briny deep.

The odds are now better than ever that future explorers, both robotic and human, will be able to take samples of the lunar’s hidden interior in deep impact basins like Crisium and Moscoviense. This gives planners more options on where to embed the first science colony.

Finding and sampling the Moon’s ancient interior mantle — one of the science drivers for sending robotic spacecraft and future NASA astronauts to the Moon’s South Pole Aitken basin — is just as likely achievable at similar deep impact basins scattered around the lunar surface.

At least that’s the view reached by planetary scientists who have been analyzing the most recent data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) missions as well as from Japan’s SELENE (Kaguya) lunar orbiter.

Continue reading “NASA Now Has New Options For Sampling Moon’s Ancient Interior” »

SpaceX has just published a stunning 360-degree video of its most recent feat: landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the ocean. If you ever wanted feel like you’re standing under a spaceship that’s landing without the awful side effect of being burned to shreds, here’s your chance.

To be honest, we thought we had seen every angle of this historic moment by this point. We watched it happen live. We watched it in 4K. We saw photos that were taken from just about every conceivable and terrifying angle.

But SpaceX has never released a 360-degree video, so you’ve definitely never seen anything quite like this. Watching the rocket descend from above from the perspective of the ship is extremely surreal, especially when you hear the landing rockets kick in. So sit back, throw your phone in a headset if you have one, and hit play. This will hopefully be just the first of many more to come. (Now if only they had filmed 360-degree videos of the ones that blew up.)

Continue reading “SpaceX releases 360-degree footage of the Falcon 9 sea landing” »