Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: innovation – Page 180

An innovative deep-space concept that relies on a solar gravity lens (SGL) to enable enhanced viewing of exoplanets is under study by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and The Aerospace Corporation.

The SGL would provide 100-billion-fold optical magnification, allowing it to show details as small as 6 miles (10 kilometers) across — similar to being able to spot something the size of New York City on an exoplanet, study team members said.

As detailed in a press statement from The Aerospace Corporation, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, light traveling through space will bend if it passes near sufficiently massive objects. This means that distant light will bend around the periphery of the sun, eventually converging toward a focal region as if it had passed through a lens. [13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens].

Read more

The day of clean, limitless energy from nuclear fusion has taken another step closer thanks to China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST). During a four-month experiment, the “Chinese artificial sun” reached a core plasma temperature of over 100 million degrees Celsius – that’s more than six times hotter than the interior of the Sun – and a heating power of 10 MW, enabling the study of various aspects of practical nuclear fusion in the process.

Read more

Bill Gates thinks toilets are a serious business, and he’s betting big that a reinvention of this most essential of conveniences can save a half million lives and deliver $200 billion-plus in savings.

The billionaire philanthropist, whose Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spent $200 million over seven years funding sanitation research, showcased some 20 novel toilet and sludge-processing designs that eliminate harmful pathogens and convert bodily waste into clean water and fertilizer.

“The technologies you’ll see here are the most significant advances in sanitation in nearly 200 years,” Gates, 63, told the Reinvented Toilet Expo in Beijing on Tuesday.

Read more

“The problems the Bay Area is facing are the problems of success,” says Grant. The northern California metropolis is among the top 50 science cities in the Nature Index, measured by its contribution to the authorship of 82 high-quality research journals. When assessed solely on the output of its corporate institutions, it ranks number one. The question is whether the Bay Area can, in the face of mounting social problems, retain these companies and the brilliant researchers whose work they depend on.

Scientific innovation has long powered the San Francisco Bay Area’s economy, but community and political challenges could undermine progress.

Read more