Lifeboat Foundation

Janice Chen, Ph.D., one of Olympic gold medalist Nathan Chen’s siblings, is on a mission to build a $100 billion biotech company.

In 2018, she co-founded Mammoth Biosciences with Trevor Martin, Lucas Harrington and Jennifer Doudna 0, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry two years later for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing. Doudna also served as Chen’s mentor while she pursued her doctorate degree in molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Continue reading “Janice Chen, Nathan Chen’s sister, is building a $100 billion CRISPR gene editing company” »

The path back to the moon is long and fraught with danger, both in the real, physical sense and also in the contractual, legal sense. NASA, the agency sponsoring the largest government-backed lunar program, Artemis, has already been feeling the pain on the contractual end. Legal battles have delayed the development of a critical component of the Artemis program – the Human Landing System (HLS). But now, the ball has started rolling again, and a NASA manager recently reported the progress and future vision of this vital part of the mission to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers at a conference.

Kent Chojnacki is the manager of NASA’s Systems Engineering & Integration Office. He recently gave a presentation entitled Human Landing System. While it only ran to six content slides, he provided some more details into how the agency is arranging its work with future contractors developing the part of the Artemis program that will take astronauts down to the lunar surface.

Continue reading “NASA Releases Details on how Starship Will be Part of its Return to the Moon” »

“The investigation into the recent cyber event on the KA-SAT European network continues in partnership with law enforcement, government partners and Viasat’s third-party cybersecurity firm,” Viasat said in a statement March 11. “We currently believe this was a deliberate, isolated and external cyber event.”

We’ve showcased plenty of EV conversions on the channel before, but up until now they’ve mostly been high-end, beautifully refurbished classics. In this episode, Jack heads to France to investigate the entry-level of EV conversion. For €5,000 after government subsidies, a company by the name of Transition One claims it can turn your old banger into a no fuss, no-emissions electric car. Is this the answer to overpriced new cars? Could this be the key to accelerating EV uptake? Check out the episode to find out.

00:00 Welcome to a crusty Fiat!
1:54 Welcome to Transition One.
3:35 One very charismatic founder.
5:30 How does it work?
7:37 The gearbox lives!
8:50 How much??
12:12 Range and specs.
13:39 Who fits it?
14:43 How many orders?
15:35 When can I buy one?
17:12 Final thoughts.

Continue reading “An ultra-cheap electric car conversion kit is FINALLY here!” »

The achievement, published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communication journal today, could see the Morrison government’s so-called hydrogen stretch goal of $2 a kilogram to make the fuel competitive reached as soon as 2025, the Hysata chief executive, Paul Barrett, said.

“We’ve gone from 75% [efficiency] to 95% – it’s really a giant leap for the electrolysis industry,” Barrett said.

Renewable energy from sources such as wind and solar is making big inroads into the power sector, supplying more than a third of eastern Australia’s electricity in the final three months of 2021. However, decarbonising industry and some transport, such as trucking, is likely to be tougher unless fuels such as hydrogen become much cheaper.

Advancing Space Tech For Future Missions — Dr. Douglas Willard, Ph.D., Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA

Dr. Douglas E. Willard, PhD, (https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/game_changing_de…g-willard/) is Program Element Manager, Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Continue reading “Dr. Douglas Willard — Game Changing Development Program, Space Technology Mission Directorate, NASA” »

The Russian government is now facing a digital storage crisis as Western cloud services have pulled their services from the country.

Western cloud storage providers have pulled out of Russia following heavy Western sanctions designed to cripple the Russian economy. According to reports, the Russian government is looking at several different ways to solve the problem of finding hosts for Russia’s data, and some of those solutions include leasing all available data storage across Russia or seizing all data storage from Russian businesses that have left the country.

Abundant fuel cell raw materials and renewables potential could add up to a green hydrogen economy in the Philippines, according to Jose Mari Angelo Abeleda Jr and Richard Espiritu, two professors at the University of the Philippines Diliman. In a paper published in this month’s Energy Policy, they explained the country is a latecomer to the sector and should develop basic and applied knowledge for training and research. The country should also establish stronger links between industry and academia, the report’s authors suggested. “The establishment of the Philippine Energy Research and Policy Institute (Perpi) is a move towards the right direction as it will be instrumental in crafting policies and pushing for activities that will usher for more private-academ[ic] partnerships for the development of fuel cell technology in the Philippines,” the scholars wrote. “However, through enabling legislation, a separate and dedicated Hydrogen Research and Development Center (HRDC) will be pivotal in ensuring that sufficient government and private funding are provided.” The authors reported progress in the production of fuel cell membranes but few developments towards large scale production, transport, and storage facilities. “The consolidation of existing renewable energy sources for hydrogen production can also be explored in order to ensure reliable and sustainable hydrogen fuel supply,” they wrote. “This is because the country will gain more benefit if it focuses more on the application of fuel cell technology on rural electrification via renewa[ble] energy-based distributed power generation, rather than on transportation such as fuel cell vehicles.”

Paris-based energy engineering company Technip Energies and Indian energy business Greenko ZeroC Private have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to explore green hydrogen project development opportunities in the refining, petrochemicals, fertilizer, chemical, and power plant sectors in India. “The MOU aims to facilitate active engagement between the teams of Technip Energies in India and Greenko to step up collaborative opportunities on a build-own-operate (BOO) model – in which Greenko will be the BOO operator and owner of the asset and Technip Energies will support with engineering services, integration and EP/EPC [engineering and procurement/engineering, procurement and constructrion] – for pilot and commercial scale green hydrogen and related projects in India in order to offer economically feasible technology solutions to clients,” the French company wrote today.

Last summer, at a time when the pandemic had strained many people’s finances, inflation was rising and unemployment was still high, the sight of the richest man in the world joyriding in space hit a nerve. On July 20 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos rode to the edge of space onboard a rocket built by his company Blue Origin. A few weeks earlier ProPublica had revealed that he did not pay any income taxes for two years, and in other years he paid a tax rate of just 0.98 percent. To many watching, it rang hollow when Bezos thanked Amazon’s workers, whose low-paid labor had enriched him enough to start his own rocket company, even though Amazon had quashed workers’ efforts to unionize several months before. The fact that another billionaire, Richard Branson, had also launched himself onboard his own company’s rocket just a week earlier did not help.

COVID changed many people’s willingness to shrug off the excesses of the rich. The pandemic drew an impossible-to-ignore distinction between those who can literally escape our world and the rest of us stuck on the ground confronting the ills of Earth: racism, climate change, global diseases. Even several members of Congress expressed their disapproval of Bezos. “Space travel isn’t a tax-free holiday for the wealthy,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Bezos and Branson putting the spotlight on themselves as passengers served to downplay the work that hundreds of scientists and engineers at Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had put into designing, building and testing their spacecraft. It also masked the reality that advances in private spaceflight really could eventually pay off in greater access to space for all and more opportunities for scientific research that could benefit everyone. All their flights did was give the impression that space—historically seen as a brave pursuit for the good of all humankind—has just become another playground for the 0.0000001 percent.