Lifeboat Foundation

For $599 your home can have a futuristic robot butler.

Make no mistake, today’s wearables are clever pieces of kit. But they can be bulky and restricted by the devices they must be tethered to. This has led engineers to create thinner and more powerful pieces of wearable technology that can be applied directly to the skin. Now, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, have developed “the world’s fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits,” that could let hospitals apply a temporary tattoo and remove the need for wires and clips.

With its snake-like shape, the new platform supports frequencies in the .3 gigahertz to 300 gigahertz range. This falls in what is set to become the 5G standard. For a mobile phone, 5G enables faster speeds and greater coverage, but with epidermal electronics, engineers have discussed the possibility that wearers could transmit their vitals to a doctor without having to leave their home.

While the idea isn’t unique, the integrated circuits created by Ma and his team have a much smaller footprint than those developed by other researchers. Earlier transmission lines can measure up to 640 micrometers (or .64 millimeters), but UW–Madison’s solution is just 25 micrometers (or .025 millimeters) thick. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research also supports Ma’s research, suggesting that his wearable breakthroughs may help pilots of the future.

Continue reading “Researchers create high-speed electronics for your skin” »

With 3D printers (like the one in India) printing buildings while leveraging AI technology we could see the building of complexes in space v. needing an inflatable room.

NASA on Saturday successfully expanded and pressurized an add-on room at the International Space Station two days after aborting the first attempt when it ran into problems.

The flexible habitat, known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), completed slowly extending 67 inches (170 centimeters) at 4:10 pm (2010 GMT) following more than seven hours during which astronaut Jeff Williams released short blasts of air into the pod’s walls from the orbiting lab using a manual valve.

Continue reading “NASA inflates spare room in space” »

The International Space Station grew in size on Saturday when the Bigelow Expandable Module (BEAM) was successfully expanded on the second attempt after the initial deployment on Thursday did not work out as planned.

Putting in a long weekend shift, teams at Mission Control and Astronaut Jeff Williams worked for close to eight hours to finally accomplish a safe expansion & pressurization of the module.

BEAM’s expansion marks the conclusion of a two-decade effort between NASA and private industry to test out expandable habitat technology in space.

Inspirational bio of the “Quantum Man” Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose contemporaries thought that he had the finest brain in physics. He was born on May 11, 1918, in Manhattan and grew up in Far Rockaway, N.Y., a section of Queens, on the Rockaway peninsula.

His parents were non-observant Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Melville Feynman, was a uniform salesman. Nevertheless, he tried to stimulate Richard to have an interest in science at an early age. Melville was the son of Lithuanian Jews who lived in Minsk and emigrated to the U.S. in 1895 when Melville was 5 years old. Although Melville wanted to become a doctor, the family could not afford to support his education. He tried a variety of occupations and finally settled in the uniform business.

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Coming this summer: Wireless internet access 100 times faster than today’s average home connection.

The Supreme Court shut down his last venture, Aereo, after it riled TV broadcasters. Now Chet Kanojia wants to overturn how broadband is delivered.

When I look at technology and other things; my brain just dissolves all boundaries/ scope of the technology was originally defined for. For me, this is and has always been in my own DNA since I was a toddler. When I first looked at VR/ AR, my future state vision just exploded immediately where and how this technology could be used, how it could transform industries and daily lives, and other future technologies. So, I am glad to see folks apply AR and VR in so many ways that will prove valuable to users, companies, and consumers.

NVIDIA is working with various companies in different sectors such as automotive, manufacturing, and medical to bring AR benefits in their business. It is working with Audi, General Motors (GM), and Ford (F) to create a VR application where the consumer can design a car by changing its wheels, paint, or seat leather. NVIDIA is also working with European (IEV) furniture manufacturer IKEA to build a virtual reality application that allows the user to design their own rooms and homes.

We knew this was going to happen. Just still neat to read about it.

(Phys.org) —NASA is planning to launch a milestone experiment involving growing plants on the moon. The target date is 2015, when the agency will deposit plants on the moon’s surface. The initiative is being driven by the Lunar Plant Growth Habitat team. They intend to use coffee-can sized containers designed to protect the plants against harsh elements of the climate, and will also provide cameras, sensors, and electronics in order to relay information about how the plants fare back to earth. NASA’s plan is “to develop a very simple sealed growth chamber that can support germination over a five to-ten day period in a spacecraft on the Moon.”

What will NASA try to grow? The containers will attempt to grow turnip, basil and Arabidopsis The latter is used often in plant research; Simon Gilroy, University of Wisconsin-Madison botany professor, has referred to the Arabidopsis as “the lab rat of plant biology.” Will the life forms survive the lunar surface? NASA’s plan is to find some answers when this “self-contained habitat,” which will have a mass of about 1 kg and would be a payload on a commercial lunar lander, is on the moon, How it gets there is another interesting side of the story, because NASA is taking advantage of a parallel event to save costs significantly.

Continue reading “Can plants grow on the moon? NASA plans test in 2015” »

My new article on how some technologies will inevitably make the government smaller:

However, there’s reason to believe that in the near future, government might dramatically shrink—not because of demands by fiscally astute Americans, but because of radical technology.

Indubitably, millions of government jobs will soon be replaced by robots. Even the US President could one day be replaced, which—strangely enough—might bring sanity to our election process.

Continue reading “Technology Will Replace the Need for Big Government” »