Lifeboat Foundation

Suffocating under the surface.

🔎 Learn more about the challenges our oceans face: https://wef.ch/2k1Z7r5

Many of the technologies we once saw in science fiction are now becoming a reality.

In July 2017, social media users shared videos and images of burning trees and melting streetlights — the purported results of a record-breaking heatwave in…

NASA life support analyst Lucie Poulet explains how analog missions work and what they tell us about future crewed missions.

Fifty years ago, humans took their first steps on the Moon. The world watched as we made history.

On July 19 at 1 p.m. EDT, we’ll salute our #Apollo50th heroes and look forward to our next giant leap.

Will you be watching? https://go.nasa.gov/327ZDZs

We teamed up with the folks behind BBC World Service’s CrowdScience to answer your questions on one topic — this week it’s all about living underwater.

[Tom Clancy]’s The Hunt For Red October is a riveting tale of a high-level Soviet defector, a cunning young intelligence analyst, a chase across the North Atlantic, and a new submarine powered by a secret stealth ‘caterpillar’ drive. Of course there weren’t a whole lot of technical details in the book, but the basic idea of this propulsion system was a magnetohydrodynamic drive. Put salt water in a tube, wrap a coil of wire around the tube, run some current through the wire, and the water spits out the back. Yes, this is a real propulsion system, and there was a prototype ferry in Japan that used the technology, but really the whole idea of a caterpillar drive is just a weird footnote in the history of propulsion.

This project for the Hackaday Prize is probably the closest we’re going to see to a caterpillar drive, and it can do it on a small remote-controlled boat. Instead of forcing water out of the back of a tube with the help of magic pixies, it’s doing it with a piston. It’s a drive for a solar boat race, and if you look at the cutaway view, it does, indeed, look like a caterpillar.

Instead of pushing water through a tube by pushing water through a magnetic field, this drive system is something like a linear motor, moving a piston back and forth. The piston contains a valve, and when the piston moves one way, it sucks water in. When the piston moves in the opposite direction, it pushes water out.

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