Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: space

Anxious Astronaut has suffered an anxiety attack in space. It could be debilitating, they’re not sure. And unlike, say, a broken arm, it is not immediately visible to Anxious’ co-workers. Anxious Astronaut is good at hiding their problem, which is how they got through the screening process on Earth. But Anxious Astronaut needs to be operating at peak functionality, which Anxious Astronaut knows, which is making them more stressed, and they haven’t even acknowledged to themselves that they’re undergoing a silent crisis. Stress is tough.

Anxious Astronaut does not want to give up their duties, so they’re not taking time to self-evaluate. And besides, any human diagnosis is millions of miles of way, considering Anxious Astronaut and their team are halfway to Mars. So how can Anxious Astronaut’s team figure out what’s wrong? A biosensor. A small, nearly invisible biosensor placed on Anxious Astronaut’s forehead has detected unusually high cortisol, which the body releases when stressed. The data is shared with the medical staff on the mission, and Anxious is able to have their workloads reduced until they’re feeling up to snuff.

Thanks to developments in biosensors that NASA and outside group NextFlex are working on today, Anxious or Unhealthy Astronaut might be able to figure out what’s ailing them at speeds unimaginable today.

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The CHEOPS mission is underway. On December 18th, the exoplanet-studying spacecraft launched from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket. Initial signals from CHEOPS show that the launch was a success.

CHEOPS stands for the Characterizing Exoplanet Satellite. It’s a partnership between ESA and Switzerland, with 10 other EU states contributing. Its mission is not to find more exoplanets, but to study the ones we already know of.

It’ll watch as these exoplanets transit in front of the star, the same way we’ve found most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered to date. But CHEOPS will be focusing on the dips in starlight with a specific intent: to find the planets’ size.

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A team of mathematicians from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Brown University has discovered a new phenomenon that generates a fluidic force capable of moving and binding particles immersed in density-layered fluids. The breakthrough offers an alternative to previously held assumptions about how particles accumulate in lakes and oceans and could lead to applications in locating biological hotspots, cleaning up the environment and even in sorting and packing.

How matter settles and aggregates under gravitation in systems, such as lakes and oceans, is a broad and important area of scientific study, one that greatly impacts humanity and the planet. Consider “marine snow,” the shower of organic matter constantly falling from upper waters to the deep ocean. Not only is nutrient-rich essential to the global food chain, but its accumulations in the briny deep represent the Earth’s largest carbon sink and one of the least-understood components of the planet’s carbon cycle. There is also the growing concern over microplastics swirling in ocean gyres.

Ocean particle accumulation has long been understood as the result of chance collisions and adhesion. But an entirely different and unexpected phenomenon is at work in the , according to a paper published Dec. 20 in Nature Communications by a team led by professors Richard McLaughlin and Roberto Camassa of the Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences, along with their UNC-Chapel Hill graduate student Robert Hunt and Dan Harris of the School of Engineering at Brown University.

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#Starliner is “go” for launch!

The launch of The Boeing Company’s Orbital Flight Test to the International Space Station, as part of our NASA Commercial Crew Program, is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 20.

Tune in starting at 5:30 a.m. EST to see the uncrewed flight test launch at 6:36 a.m. EST for the spacecraft’s maiden mission to our orbiting laboratory.

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United Launch Alliance €™s countdown is underway in preparation for liftoff of an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Friday at 6:36 a.m. EST (1136 GMT) with Boeing €™s Starliner crew capsule on an unpiloted Orbital Flight Test to the International Space Station.

LIVE COVERAGE: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/12/18/atlas-5-av-080-starliner-oft-mission-status-center/

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A year marked by climate protests, political uncertainty and debate over the ethics of gene editing in human embryos proved challenging for science. But researchers also celebrated some exciting firsts — a quantum computer that can outperform its classical counterparts, a photo of a black hole and samples gathered from an asteroid.

Climate strikes, marsquakes and gaming AIs are among the year’s top stories.

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The surface of the Sun is never still. Upon this burning ball of gas, a continual flow of super-hot plasma creates ropes of magnetic fields that can twist and tangle with one another.

As the star rotates, these invisible lines snap apart and join together again, bursting into flares, storms and eruptions of plasma.

This phenomenon, known as magnetic reconnection, has been seen many times before on the Sun and even around our own planet, but we’ve only captured spontaneous reconnections in the past.

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