Lifeboat Foundation

Just days after Earth was hit by a coronal mass ejection (CME), it appears another blast of solar wind is due to impact Earth on Sunday; it is currently traveling at a brisk 1118, 468 mph towards the planet.

A minor G1-class Geomagnetic Storm is possible late Saturday into much of Sunday as the solar wind interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field. While the National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center has not issued any advisory for this solar wind yet, a watch or warning could be posted tomorrow for this event.

Are drone swarms for firefighting the future of fire supression? New work from engineer and mathematician Elena Ausonio and a team of Italian researchers suggests that they could be.

The following is a guest post by Max Lenz, Executive Editor and project manager at the Berlin-based DroneMasters Boost GmbH and editor of the weekly DroneMasters Briefing. DRONELIFE neither makes nor accepts payment for guest posts.

Very close to Vicenza.

Covid “super-immune” people seem to be in a high concentration in Vo’. Researchers want to know why.

Made from piled-up blocks of sandstone, some of which weighed more than 500 kilograms, mustatils ranged from 20 metres to more than 600 metres in length, but their walls stood only 1.2 metres high. “It’s not designed to keep anything in, but to demarcate the space that is clearly an area that needs to be isolated,” says Thomas.

In a typical mustatil, long walls surround a central courtyard, with a distinctive rubble platform, or “head”, at one end and entryways at the opposite end. Some entrances were blocked by stones, suggesting they could have been decommissioned after use.

Excavations at one mustatil showed that the centre of the head contained a chamber within which there were fragments of cattle horns and skulls. The cattle fragments may have been presented as offerings, suggesting mustatils may have been used for rituals.

Indefinitely. But, nice to see this stuff cracking the mainstream.

The Health Issue.

Continue reading “How Long Can We Live?” »

Circa 2014 o.o!

A new design for a piston-free linear engine generator has just been released by Toyota. With remarkable efficiency, the device might be scaled up to compete with electric power plants used in cars today.

Continue reading “Toyota develops high-efficiency ‘free piston’ no-crankshaft combustion engine… to power an EV” »

Circa 2019

It wasn’t until 1947 that their son broke through the rock and uncovered what was attached to the wooden handle — an iron-headed hammer. For close to four decades, the hammer remained a local oddity and relatively unknown, until it came to the attention of Carl Baugh, a Young Earth creationist after an article was published on the artifact in the Bible-Science Newsletter in 1983. Baugh was influential in a form of creationism which believes that Earth and all its forms of life were created by a deity’s supernatural acts 6000–10000 years ago. He promoted the hammer as proof of an antediluvian discovery, which remains in an exhibit at Baugh’s Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas.

Of equal interest to archaeologists, the London Hammer posed a scientific dilemma. What could possibly explain how a modern instrument was encased in ancient, prehistoric Ordovician rock from between 65–135 million years ago?

Continue reading “This Mysterious Hammer is Alleged to be Millions of Years Old” »

Two-photon photoemission studies electrons deep in sample.

Virtual meetings that are a bit more meeting-like.

Zoom is rolling out a video background feature called Immersive View that could make video calls feel a bit more like an office meeting — or at least look a lot more like one. Zoom announced the feature last year at its Zoomtopia conference, but now it’s actually available for Free and Pro accounts attending meetings and webinars with up to 25 participants.

Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has, but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Meeting hosts can enable Immersive View from the same menu where you can find Speaker View and Gallery View; from there, Zoom will automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium, or the meeting host can manually place them themselves.

Continue reading “Zoom’s Immersive View could make video calls feel a bit more in-person” »