Lifeboat Foundation

What if robots could figure out more things on their own and share that knowledge among themselves?

Availability: 3–5 years.

Paddy Neumann kind of looks like someone who’s really into brewing beer. But back when he was a third year student at the University of Sydney, the now Dr. Neumann started on a course of experimentation that would see him beat innovations by NASA’s top scientists.

For his final research project, Neumann was working with the university’s plasma discharge, mapping the electric and magnetic charges around it. He noticed the particles moving through the machine were going really fast. In fact, they were clocking in at around 14 miles per second.

“I looked at my numbers from that final year project and thought, You could probably make a rocket out of this,” he says. Particularly when you consider that conventional hydrogen-oxygen rockets only get around 2.8 miles per second.

Continue reading “How an Australian College Student Did What NASA Couldn’t” »

A scientific breakthrough can unlock long-standing problems and have the potential to have a long-term impact on human wellbeing. But which UK project thrilled and amazed us in 2016?

Two years ago, Studio Roosegaarde created a glow-in-the-dark bike path in Eindhoven, Netherlands, helping to light the route in a exciting way. Inspired by that, a materials technology center in Lidzbark Warminski, Poland, has followed suit, with equally dazzling results.

The materials tech center, TPA Gesellschaft für Qualitätssicherung und Innovation (TPAQI), tells New Atlas that it first drew attention to the Eindhoven bike path at a local road forum event. The underlying concept was floated as a potential option for creating something that would reflect the beauty of the surrounding landscape.

Work began about a year ago, with lab tests into how the glowing effect would be created. A variety of different materials and colors were tested, with the aim of creating something that would both look great and that would increase safety for cyclists and pedestrians.

Continue reading “Glow-in-the-dark bike path lights the way in Poland” »

“Pilots push the speeds to the limit, head to Bolivia for high altitude testing, and even try to fly with missing winglets. … We went aboard to see how it’s done.”

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“Brittan Heller has a hard job. The Anti-Defamation League’s first director of technology and society, she’ll be working with tech companies to combat online harassment.”

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The world-renowned physicist’s alarmist warnings about extraterrestrials is illogical.

The Estes Park Advanced Propulsion Workshop, 20–22 September 2016, organized by the Space Studies Institute (SSI), will feature presentations by NASA Eagleworks scientist Paul March and Prof. Martin Tajmar, chair for Space Systems at the Dresden University of Technology, who last year presented an independent confirmation of the anomalous EmDrive thrust.

Other notable participants include Prof. James Woodward and Prof. Heidi Fearn, both from California State University, Fullerton, and Prof. David Hyland from Texas A and M University.

The 3-day conference will address at most 6 concepts for a breakthrough in propulsion. They are devoting a half-day per concept. The half-day is broken into theory and experiment sessions for the concept. The concept will be investigated on both grounds, with substantial give-and-take between the audience and the concept presenter, verbally and on the whiteboard.

Continue reading “Exotic Space Propulsion including Mach Propulsion and EMDrive will be discussed at Space Studies Institute conference” »

Interesting for sure.

Two UCs and Stanford partner in a new research center focused on biotechnology and life sciences innovation.