Lifeboat Foundation

One of the worst environmental disasters of the decade is currently underway in a quiet community 25 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Putrid, methane-rich natural gas has been spewing into the air at an estimated rate of nearly 1,300 metric tons per day for over two months. Experts are calling it the climate version of the BP oil spill, and the leak isn’t going to be contained anytime soon.

Natural gas is often touted as a cleaner energy source than oil or coal, because of the lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with burning it. But as this disaster highlights, there are insidious risk to natural gas production. Coupled with weak regulation, they can make this energy source as dirty as the fossil fuels it’s meant to replace.

Continue reading “LA’s Gas Leak Is a Global Disaster” »

A laser set to begin live-fire tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, in January uses rare earth minerals. It was developed by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of Poway, Calif., the company that produced the revolutionary MQ-1 Predator drone. Its precise power levels are classified, but Michael Perry, the company’s vice president for laser programs, said the experimental weapon’s beam is in the 150-kilowatt class. That’s more than 100 times the power needed to heat an electric oven to 350 degrees.

The General Atomics laser is five times more powerful than the only laser the military has fielded, the 30-kilowatt-class Laser Weapon System, a fiber laser the Navy developed that has knocked down small drones and crippled small boat swarms in tests at short range. That laser was installed on the USS Ponce, an Afloat Forward Staging Base deployed to the Middle East, in 2014. This past October, the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a $53 million contract to develop a more powerful shipboard laser.

Continue reading “150 Kilowatt lasers will be tested on predator drones and AC130 gunships in 2016” »

Specifications:

Performance Power output: 1088 hp Torque: 1600 Nm from 0 to 6500 rpm Acceleration: 0–100 km/h (0−62 mph) 2,8 seconds Range: up to 600 km (realistic range — 500 km) Braking distance: 31.5m (100−0 km/h) Lateral g-force: 1.4 g Efficiency: 140–550 Wh/km 40 kW on-board charging 100 kW fast DC-charging Weight-to-power ratio: 1.79 kg/hp Weight distribution: 42% front, 58% rear

Continue reading “Rimac — Electric Concept One Super Car 1088hp” »

A nanomaterials chemist has figured out a good way to mimic leaves and turn water and carbon dioxide into things we need.

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2015 was literally and figuratively the year of the hoverboard. While everyone was talking about the self-balancing scooters, two companies showed off skateboard-shaped boards that actually hovered a few inches above the Earth: Lexus with the “Slide” board, and Arx Pax with its second generation Hendo Hoverboard. Now, just days before the new year, another company called ArcaSpace is taking a shot at making the mythical hoverboard.

ArcaSpace is primarily a private space company, and one of the original 26 teams that competed in the Ansari X Prize competition in 2004. (It also entered the Lunar X Prize competition, too, before pulling out in 2013.) But early this morning the company released a video that shows off the “ArcaBoard,” a fan-powered rectangle that can lift a person off the ground by almost a foot.

The ArcaBoard gets its power — 430 pounds of thrust, or 272 horsepower, according to the company — from 36 electric fans. The company also says its built in some self-balancing tech to make it fly smoothly. Beyond that, though, it doesn’t look like there’s much to the experience. Dumitru Propescu, ArcaSpace’s CEO, is seen riding it in the video, but it doesn’t look like he has much control over where it’s going. It’s actually pretty reminiscent of the Hendo Hoverboard videos — sure, it hovers, but you can’t really steer it enough to ever use it to get anywhere.

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Companies are working on sending electricity through the air, says Jurica Dujmović.

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China wants to be the leading force in manned space exploration, and is exploring sending people to the far side of the moon, Mars, asteroids, and further into deep space.

Becoming the second largest economy in the world and an emerging superpower of its own, China wishes to add deep space exploration into its achievement portfolio. Besides the ongoing moon exploration, its scientists are considering going deeper into the solar system, including Mars, asteroids, and even manned deep-space mission. Liu Jizhong, director of the lunar exploration program and space engineering center, pointed out that China has to be more pioneering, tackling problems such as high speed deep space exploration, energy and power generation, space robot development, and more. He also said that China must cooperate with others as space exploration is an undertaking shared by the entire human species.

China currently intends to explore the far side of the moon, something that has never been done before. It would require a relay satellite for communication and navigation on Lagrange point, where the satellite could orbit within the combined gravitational pull of the Earth-moon system, as said by Zhang Lihua of China Spacesat Co. While China believes that robots are critical to the mission, it also believes that these trips must be manned in order to effectively leverage human decision-making. China also says they are designing footed robots to explore asteroids and better understand their material composition.

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Sony is planning to commercialize lithium-sulfur batteries by 2020, and promising increases of up to 40% over conventional lithium-ion architectures. The devil is in the details, but a battery with 40% more specific energy at the same weight and cost as lithium-ion would enable EVs at lower price points.

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This battery electric multicopter is part spider and part futuristic flying machine.

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