Lifeboat Foundation

Have you seen C/2021 A1 (Leonard) —a.k.a. “Comet Leonard”—yet? Discovered on January 3, 2021 by Greg Leonard, a senior research specialist at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon Observatory, Comet Leonard is potentially going to become an object visible to binocular and even naked eyes. It’s predicted to reach around magnitude 4 or brighter in December 2021 (for the latest, follow it on Twitter).

It will get closest to the Earth to be super-bright on December 12, 2021, but by then it’s going to be fairly low in the sky. So your best chance is to get up early—about 90 minutes before sunrise—during early December and look east.

Arm yourself with either a small telescope or any pair of binoculars to maximize your chances.

A rare 54-page manuscript featuring preliminary calculations for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity sold for about $13 million at auction in Paris Tuesday to an unknown buyer — almost four times more than expected.

It was originally anticipated to fetch $3.5 million.

Auction house Christie’s declined to identify the winning bidder to NBC News.

Continue reading “Rare Einstein Papers Containing Early Relativity Calculations Fetch $13 Million At Auction” »

Finding evidence of life on another planet would be a game-changer. Right now, we cannot predict how common life is in the Universe because we don’t understand what causes that initial spark of life. We only have one data point — our planet. Finding life on another planet within our solar system would illustrate one of two things. Either, life can begin easily enough that it formed twice within the same solar system, or whatever mechanism started life on Earth also somehow started life on Mars (for example, cross-contamination via meteorite). That’s why, in the search for life on Mars, we must make sure we get it right. Recent research published in the Journal of the Geological Society examines how to know if a structure is a fossil or simply a formation that resulted from a physical, non-biological process. Life on Ancient Mars Mars was a very different place four billion years ago. Under a thick atmosphere, a large ocean formed. During this time, Mars may have been temporarily habitable. Eventually, this water was lost to space or locked up in global ice caps. The search for life on Mars, then, is through ancient fossils — microbial evidence that the surface of Mars was inhabitable by microscopic life. Full Story:

Bringing global giants into the economic fight.

The world’s biggest chip-making nation is getting serious.

Continue reading “Japan Is Investing Over $5 Billion to Solve the World’s Chip Shortage” »

Sooo… the inimitable Russell Brand posted a video a few weeks ago saying some amusing but largeuly inaccurate and misleading things about the Grace humanoid eldercare robot we’re making in our Awakening Health project (http://awakening.health).

Russell’s video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDD7M1OWBDg.

Continue reading “Why We’re Making the Grace Humanoid Eldercare Robot: Response to Russell Brand” »

Research led by UT Southwestern and the University of Washington could lead to a wealth of drug targets.

UT Southwestern and University of Washington researchers led an international team that used artificial intelligence (AI) and evolutionary analysis to produce 3D models of eukaryotic protein interactions. The study, published in Science, identified more than 100 probable protein complexes for the first time and provided structural models for more than 700 previously uncharacterized ones. Insights into the ways pairs or groups of proteins fit together to carry out cellular processes could lead to a wealth of new drug targets.

“Our results represent a significant advance in the new era in structural biology in which computation plays a fundamental role,” said Qian Cong, Ph.D., Assistant Professor in the Eugene McDermott Center for Human Growth and Development with a secondary appointment in Biophysics.

The findings could inform the design of new materials such as iridescent windows or waterproof textiles.

If you brush against the wings of a butterfly, you will likely come away with a fine sprinkling of powder. This lepidopteran dust is made up of tiny microscopic scales, hundreds of thousands of which paper a butterfly’s wings like shingles on a wafer-thin roof. The structure and arrangement of these scales give a butterfly its color and shimmer, and help shield the insect from the elements.

Now, MIT

When we talk about the distance to an object in the expanding Universe, we’re always taking a cosmic snapshot — a sort of “God’s eye view” — of how things are at this particular instant in time: when the light from these distant objects arrives. We know that we’re seeing these objects as they were in the distant past, not as they are today — some 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang — but rather as they were when they emitted the light that arrives today.

But when we talk about, “how far away is this object,” we’re not asking how far away it was from us when it emitted the light we’re now seeing, and we aren’t asking how long the light has been in transit. Instead, we’re asking how far away the object, if we could somehow “freeze” the expansion of the Universe right now, is located from us at this very instant. The farthest observed galaxy GN-z11, emitted its now-arriving light 13.4 billion years ago, and is located some 32 billion light-years away. If we could see all the way back to the instant of the Big Bang, we’d be seeing 46.1 billion light-years away, and if we wanted to know the most distant object whose light hasn’t yet reached us, but will someday, that’s presently a distance of ~61 billion light-years away: the future visibility limit.

Natural selection, the evolutionary process that guides which traits become more common in a population, has been acting on us for the past 3,000 years, right up to the modern day, new research suggests.

And it seems to be acting in surprising ways on complex traits encoded by multiple genes, such as those tied to intelligence, mental illness and even cancer.