Lifeboat Foundation

This is amazing.

This is a comic about NASA’s Insight mission to Mars.

Experiments suggest that exotic superconducting materials share a “strange metal” state characterized by a quantum speed limit that somehow acts as a fundamental organizing principle.

Scientists used to think a “warp bubble” would require an impractical amount of energy. That’s starting to change.

The dome where crew members practiced red-planet missions will now be converted to a simulated moon base.

Unexplained patterns in the colors of certain space rocks suggest scientists still have much to learn about the solar system’s origins and early evolution.

• By Katherine Kornei on November 20, 2018

Intended for silicon photonics, the photonic-crystal waveguide has a large bandwidth and is CMOS-compatible.

One of the strangest things that can sicken us—a rogue misfolded protein that destroys the brain, known as a prion—is even scarier than we knew. Researchers were able to find the prions responsible for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD), the most common prion disease in people, seeded everywhere in the eyes of 11 patients affected by it.

The findings are the latest to suggest that these universally fatal, if rare, diseases can be spread through the eyes. But they also indicate that our eyes might be someday be used to spot these cases with less hassle than current testing methods.

With the power to unleash as much energy in 10 seconds as the Sun does in its entire lifetime, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most energetic events in the universe, second only to the Big Bang itself. Given how sudden they are, we don’t usually get any warning, but now astronomers have spotted the telltale signs of a star system that could blow its lid any moment – and it’s far too close to Earth for comfort.

A ubiquitous quantum phenomenon has been detected in a large class of superconducting materials, fueling a growing belief among physicists that an unknown organizing principle governs the collective behavior of particles and determines how they spread energy and information.