Lifeboat Foundation

As vital as clean water is for human life, unfortunately it’s not always easy for people to get enough. Adding insult to injury, the stuff is basically always floating around us in the air, unreachable. Now, researchers from the University of California Berkeley have developed a device that can wring drinkable amounts of water out of even the driest air.

The team says this new water harvester can produce more than 1.3 L (5.4 US cups) of water per day per kilogram (2.2 lb) of a particular water-absorbing material. This can be done even at less than 40 percent relative humidity. That’s not a whole lot of water, but it is more than enough to keep a person alive, if a situation was that dire.

The harvester was put to the test over three days in the Mojave Desert. During that time, the device produced 0.7 L (3 cups) of water per kg of material, and even on the driest day the harvester managed to wring 200 ml (6 oz) of water out of air that had an extremely low relative humidity of just seven percent.

Nobody can say for sure. Hundreds of years ago, atoms were thought to be the smallest particles in the universe. But since then, scientists like Indu invented tools such as particle detectors, accelerators, and colliders that can study them in great detail. Thanks to these tools, they have discovered a whole set of elementary particles, which are the smallest particles we know about today.

Quarks and gluons are two such elementary particles that combine to form protons and neutrons. These, along with electrons, make up atoms. Atoms constitute most of the matter that we know about—from trees and stones to animals and birds. But Indu was amazed to learn that there is a whole set of particles that exist but are not part of atoms at all. One such elementary particle is the neutrino, Indu’s absolute favourite! Neutrinos are everywhere. They whiz across the universe—from the sun and from elsewhere in outer space. Many of them reach us here on earth too. So, how common are they?

Tell you what. Snap your fingers right now. Done? In the amount of time it took you to do this, billions of neutrinos have passed through your thumb! Neutrinos may be tiny, but they are very important because our universe is full of them. Knowing the mass of a neutrino will help Indu understand the rate at which the universe is expanding.

Continue reading “Meet the Indian scientist who wants to capture one of the universe’s smallest particles” »

Tesla is planning to ramp up installation of its new solar roof, but it needs to figure out a way to reduce installation time.

Now a new patent shows a possible solution by producing and installing solar roof tiles in jointed groups.

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General Motors is the latest automaker reported to be working on solid-state lithium batteries, thanks to a $2 million grant from Uncle Sam.

The money is part of a larger grant to develop more fuel-efficient powertrains, CNET reported. The company is expected to use the rest of the money to develop a lighter-weight, more efficient engine for medium duty trucks, perhaps to replace the company’s 6.2-liter V-8.

Continue reading “Kilopower: NASA’s Offworld Nuclear Reactor” »

Read more about this major milestone: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/nasa-s-james-webb-…first-time

Reaching a major milestone, engineers have successfully connected the two halves of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time at Northrop Grumman’s facilities in Redondo Beach, California. Once it reaches space, NASA’s most powerful and complex space telescope will explore the cosmos using infrared light, from planets and moons within our solar system to the most ancient and distant galaxies.

Continue reading “NASA James Webb Space Telescope Assembled for the First Time” »

(SCRUBBED) Watch SpaceX’s Starhopper come alive for the second time, as it attempts a 150 Meter test hover.

Scientists at MIT built a 16-bit microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes and even ran a program on it, a new paper reports.

Silicon-based computer processors seem to be approaching a limit to how small they can be scaled, so researchers are looking for other materials that might make for useful processors. It appears that transistors made from tubes of rolled-up, single-atom-thick sheets of carbon, called carbon nanotubes, could one day have more computational power while requiring less energy than silicon.

“This work is particularly exciting because carbon nanotubes are one of the most promising supplements in the future of beyond-silicon computers,” Max Shulaker, the study’s corresponding author and assistant professor at MIT, told Gizmodo.

A Tesla Roadster launched into space with a spacesuit-clad mannequin at the wheel has completed its first lap of the sun.

SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, was blasted into orbit from Cape Canaveral last year and it is hoped that it will veer close to Mars and Earth during the course of its time among the stars.

According to tracking website Where Is Roadster?, the red sports car has now completed a solar orbit, having been cruising through the void for more than 18 months.

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The proof-of-concept demonstrations herald a major step forward in quantum communications.