Teens, Inspired! Luisa Lyons

Bernard Frize at Galerie Perrotin Paris. 

Stephen Hawking Is Building Thousands Of Tiny Spaceships To Find Intelligent Life

When asked what extraterrestrial intelligent life might look like, Hawking answered, "Judging from the election campaign, definitely not like us."

World famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced Tuesday their newest attempt to find extraterrestrial life: a project called Breakthrough Starshot.

“Today we commit to the next great leap in the cosmos,” Hawking told reporters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. “Because we are human and our nature is to fly.”

Hawking said the goal of Breakthrough Starshot was to reach Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to us, within a generation by using thousands of tiny spaceships.

Astronomers believe an Earth-like planet could exist within the “habitable zones” of Alpha Centauri, located 25 trillion miles away. It is therefore the most likely place to find life or even, as Hawking said, a possible new home for future humans.

Breakthrough Starshot’s spacecrafts, which they call “nanocrafts,” will be a gram-scale computer chip that will include “cameras, photon thrusters, power supply, navigation and communication equipment,” Avi Loeb, a Harvard scientist involved in the operation told reporters.

A rocket would deliver a “mother ship” carrying a thousand or so of the nanocrafts into space. Once in orbit, the crafts would be propelled with thin sails and hyper-powerful laser beams shot from Earth into the universe to explore and discover. There the crafts would take pictures of their surroundings, which would take around four years to be sent back to earth.

The nanocrafts would travel at around 20% of the speed of light, Loeb said. At that rate it would be possible to reach Alpha Centauri in around 20 years, and the potentially habitable planets within 70. Using the best currently existing technology, it would take some 78,000 years.

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FINAL WEEK! Flatlands brings together paintings by five emerging artists—Nina Chanel Abney, Mathew Cerletty, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Caitlin Keogh, and Orion Martin.

Orion Martin (b. 1988), Bakers Steak, 2015. Oil on canvas, 51 ½ in. × 35 ½ in. (130.8 × 90.17 cm). Courtesy of the artist

Asian beef skewers

101 dalmatians style sweettea mishap.

this was really fun to do, and i feel a lot better now that it’s done! glad I didn’t give up part way like I wanted to!

Winds a quarter the speed of light spotted leaving mysterious binary systems

"We think these so-called 'ultra-luminous x-ray sources' are special binary systems, sucking up gas at a much higher rate than an ordinary x-ray binary," said Dr Ciro Pinto from Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the paper's lead author.

Astronomers have observed two black holes in nearby galaxies devouring their companion stars at an extremely high rate, and spitting out matter at a quarter the speed of light.

Two black holes in nearby galaxies have been observed devouring their companion stars at a rate exceeding classically understood limits, and in the process, kicking out matter into surrounding space at astonishing speeds of around a quarter the speed of light.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, used data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton space observatory to reveal for the first time strong winds gusting at very high speeds from two mysterious sources of x-ray radiation. The discovery, published in the journal Nature, confirms that these sources conceal a compact object pulling in matter at extraordinarily high rates.

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Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte (WLM)

A 1,000-piece chromatic jigsaw puzzle by Clemens Habicht. 

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The Sequence is an urban art installation in Brussels, Belgium designed by artist Arne Quinze.

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