Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2015.

LEDs have come a long ways. From the early 70s when a bulky LED watch cost thousands of dollars to LG’s announcement last month that it had created an OLED TV as thin as a magazine, these glowing little bits of magic have become wonderfully cheap and impossibly small. But guess what: they’re about to get much smaller.

A team scientists from the University of Washington just built the world’s thinnest possible LED for use as a light source in electronics. It’s just three atoms thick. No, not three millimeters. Not three nanometers. Three atoms.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest LED will be 3 atoms thick!” »

Circa 2018

The world’s first-ever hiking boots to use graphene have been unveiled by The University of Manchester and British brand inov-8.

Building on the international success of their pioneering use of graphene in trail running and fitness shoes last summer, the brand is now bringing the revolutionary technology to a market recently starved of innovation.

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Swiss researchers are getting excited about a polymer that could allow them to incorporate a “flexible solar concentrator” in textile fibres, making it possible to charge personal electronic devices from the clothes their owners wear.

Boston Dynamics announced that it has developed a robot arm for its “Spot” robot and also a charging station. Both will be available for purchase this spring.

The robot Spot made quite a splash on the internet last year, thanks to its YouTube videos. The four-legged yellow-bodied robot was shown marching its way autonomously and untethered through a wide variety of terrain in ways reminiscent of a dog; hence its name. The robot dog is available for sale. Those interested can purchase one directly from Boston Dynamics for $75,000. CEO Rob Playter told members of the press recently that the company has sold 260 of the robots as of last June. Those robots are currently being tested (and in some cases, used) in mining, healthcare, construction and other sectors—mostly in situations that are dangerous for people. The company has also created a host of add-ons for the robot to assist in a wide variety of applications. The company is now adding to that list by making available both a robot arm and a charging station.

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NASA reports that it’s got a robust sample from the surface of the asteroid Bennu. There is one snafu; gaps in the collecting lid is causing some loss of the pristine material.

Looks like there is another way to use plastic bottles.

Why not use your old plastic bottles as the joining material?

Scientists have created a super white paint that is the yin to Vantablack’s yang.

While ultra black materials can today absorb more than 99.96 percent of sunlight, this new super white coat can reflect 95.5 percent of all the photons that hit it.

Instead of warming up under direct light, objects painted with this new acrylic material can remain cooler than their surrounding temperature even under the Sun, which could allow for a new energy-efficient way to control temperature inside buildings.

Circa 2019

“Frustration” plus a pulse of laser light resulted in a stable “supercrystal” created by a team of researchers led by Penn State and Argonne National Laboratory, together with University of California, Berkeley, and two other national laboratories.

This is one of the first examples of a new state of matter with long-term stability transfigured by the energy from a sub-pico-second laser pulse. The team’s goal, supported by the Department of Energy, is to discover interesting states of matter with unusual properties that do not exist in equilibrium in nature.

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Photos of touching down on an asteroid.

On Tuesday, October 20th, NASA made history when the OSIRIS-REx mission successfully completed a “touch-and-go” sample collection maneuver with asteroid 101955 Bennu over 200 million miles away from Earth. And now, we have the timelapse to prove it.

Continue reading “NASA Shares Photos from ‘Touch-and-Go’ with Asteroid Bennu 200 Million Miles Away” »