Lifeboat Foundation

Is it an egg, a blimp or a bullet? Whatever you might want to call the shape of the Otto Celera 500L, it’s one that catches the eye. It looks like no other plane out there, and for a good reason: unique aerodynamics.

The shape of the Celera is designed to drastically reduce drag by allowing air to flow very smoothly over the surface of the plane. That makes the aircraft less power-hungry, which means it burns less fuel.

“This gets us four to five times the efficiency of other turboprop aircraft, and seven to eight times the efficiency of jet aircraft,” says William Otto Jr., CEO of Otto Aviation.

Even after 30 months in space, The Planetary Society’s LightSail 2 mission continues to successfully “sail on sunbeams” demonstrating solar sail technology in Earth orbit. The mission is providing hard data for future missions that hope to employ solar sails to explore the cosmos.

LightSail 2, a small cubesat, launched in June 2019 on a SpaceX

Continue reading “LightSail 2 Has Been Flying in Space for 30 Months — Paving the Way for Future Solar Sail Missions” »

Octopuses, crabs and lobsters will receive greater welfare protection in UK law following an LSE report which demonstrates that there is strong scientific evidence that these animals have the capacity to experience pain, distress or harm.

The UK government has today confirmed that that the scope of the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill will be extended to all decapod crustaceans and cephalopod molluscs.

This move follows the findings of a government-commissioned independent review led by Dr Jonathan Birch. The review drew on over 300 existing scientific studies to evaluate evidence of sentience in cephalopods (including octopuses, squid and cuttlefish) and decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish).

Circa 2008

The tiny invertebrates, also known as tardigrades, survived in the vacuum of space for 10 days.

The vehicle was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while travelling at five times the speed of sound.

China tested a hypersonic vehicle in July that was able to fire off its own missile over the South China Sea while travelling at five times the speed of sound, in a physics-defying display of technology that no other country has demonstrated, according to a new report.

A rare manuscript by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein goes under the hammer in Paris on Tuesday, with auctioneers aiming for a stratospheric price tag.

The manuscript, containing preparatory work for Einstein’s key achievement the theory of relativity, is estimated at between two and three million euros (2.3−3.4 million), according to Christie’s which is hosting the sale on behalf of the Aguttes auction house.

“This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction,” Christie’s said in a statement.

Threat actors are hacking Microsoft Exchange servers using ProxyShell and ProxyLogon exploits to distribute malware and bypass detection using stolen internal reply-chain emails.

When threat actors conduct malicious email campaigns, the hardest part is to trick users into trusting the sender enough so that they open up linked to or included malware-distributing attachments.

TrendMicro researchers have discovered an interesting tactic used of distributing malicious email to a company’s internal users using the victim’s compromised Microsoft exchange servers.

A research team at the University of Wisconsin – Madison has identified a new way to convert ammonia to nitrogen gas through a process that could be a step toward ammonia replacing carbon-based fuels.

The discovery of this technique, which uses a metal catalyst and releases, rather than requires, energy, was reported on November 8, 2021, in Nature Chemistry and has received a provisional patent from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

“The world currently runs on a carbon fuel economy,” explains Christian Wallen, an author of the paper and a former postdoctoral researcher in the lab of UW–Madison chemist John Berry. “It’s not a great economy because we burn hydrocarbons, which release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We don’t have a way to close the loop for a true carbon cycle, where we could transform carbon dioxide back into a useful fuel.”

Homer Hickam is perhaps best known for his memoir Rocket Boys, later captured in the film October Sky. While he enjoyed a fruitful career at NASA, he’s looking to interplanetary colonization.