Lifeboat Foundation

On May 20, China launched Queqiao, a lunar communications relay satellite for the upcoming Chang’e 4 lander and rover mission. On the way out to the Moon, it dropped off a pair of small satellites bound for lunar orbit called Longjiang-1 and Longjiang-2. The satellites weigh just 45 kilograms each and measure 50-by-50-by-40 centimeters. Their purpose is testing out future radio astronomy and interferometry techniques, and one also has a camera built by Saudi Arabia.

Unfortunately, Longjiang-1 had a problem and didn’t make it into lunar orbit. Longjiang-2, however, was successful, and sent home a few pictures! Check them out:

A Dutch construction company is about to 3D print five actually habitable homes near the city of Eindhoven. But can the technique replace brick and mortar?

Too bad the middle class is shrinking!

The rate of growth in residential rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV) in Australia since 2008 has been nothing short of breathtaking.

Our new research suggests that the households most likely to join in the solar spree are those that are affluent enough to afford the upfront investment, but not so wealthy that they don’t worry about their future power bills.

Continue reading “Are solar panels a middle-class purchase? This survey says yes” »

Last October, a University of California, Berkeley, team headed down to the Arizona desert, plopped their newest prototype water harvester into the backyard of a tract home and started sucking water out of the air without any power other than sunlight.

The successful field test of their larger, next-generation harvester proved what the team had predicted earlier in 2017: that the water harvester can extract drinkable water every day/night cycle at very low humidity and at low cost, making it ideal for people living in arid, water-starved areas of the world.

“There is nothing like this,” said Omar Yaghi, who invented the technology underlying the harvester. “It operates at ambient temperature with ambient sunlight, and with no additional energy input you can collect water in the desert. This laboratory-to-desert journey allowed us to really turn water harvesting from an interesting phenomenon into a science.”

Continue reading “In desert trials, next-generation water harvester delivers fresh water from air” »

“Society is vulnerable, so we need to prepare ourselves as individuals,” said Dan Eliasson of the Swedish civil contingencies agency, which is in charge of the project. “There’s also an information deficit in terms of concrete advice, which we aim to provide.”

Defence pamphlet shows how population can prepare in event of attack and contribute to country’s ‘total defence’

Jon Henley European affairs correspondent.

Continue reading “Sweden distributes ‘be prepared for war’ leaflet to all 4.8m homes” »

Update from a space robot rolling around Mars!

Sols 5073–5102

Opportunity continued exploring the south trough of Perseverance in May, still looking for evidence that explains just how this one-of-a-kind valley meandering through Endeavour Crater’s rim formed, and, along the way, helped the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission chalk up yet another first, linking with three relay orbiters in one Martian day or sol to send a pipeline of data home.

Continue reading “The Mars Exploration Rovers Update: Opportunity Makes Tracks on Magical Mystery Tour of Different Rocks” »

The Dutch city of Eindhoven is to host the world’s first commercial housing project based on 3D-concrete printing, with the first of five planned houses due to start construction this year. The units were developed by a collaborative team including the Eindhoven University of Technology and will be purchased and let out by a real estate company upon completion.

The first house will be a single-floor, three-room house measuring 1000 square feet (95 square meters), to be followed by four multi-story units. The irregular shape of the buildings is based on “erratic blocks in the green landscape,” made possible due to the flexibility of form permitted by 3D-printing.

Continue reading “World’s First 3D-Printed Concrete Housing Project to be Built in Eindhoven” »

Not familiar with residential geothermal heating? No surprise. Chris Martin in Bloomberg explained that “Residential geothermal heating is uncommon, in part because the expense and effort to dig the wells make them costly to install in existing homes.”

Dandelion CEO Kathy Hannun told CNNMoney that “It’s a very niche technology that hasn’t taken off at all in this country.” Her Brooklyn-based company, Dandelion, is out there to make geothermal heating—extracting underground heat to keep homes warm— more affordable for homeowners.

On Wednesday, Dandelion launched the Dandelion Air as a home heating and air conditioning system. Dandelion’s claims: it’s 4 times more efficient than any furnace on the market and almost twice as efficient as a conventional air conditioning system. So, when you go up to Dandelion’s web site there is one sole message and it reads loud and clear. “Geothermal heating and air conditioning so efficient it pays for itself.”

Continue reading “Dandelion wants to play a role in home geothermal” »

https://www.engadget.com/…/3D-printed-brain-medical-imagin…/

There are almost limitless possibilities when it comes to 3D printing. Design your own color-changing jewelry? Fine. Fabricate your own drugs? No problem. Print an entire house in under 24 hours? Sure! Now, researchers have come up with a fast and easy way to print palm-sized models of individual human brains, presumably in a bid to advance scientific endeavours, but also because, well, that’s pretty neat.

In theory, creating a 3D printout of a human brain has been done before, using data from MRI and CT scans. But as MIT graduate Steven Keating found when he wanted to examine his own brain following his surgery to remove a baseball-sized tumour, it’s a slow, cumbersome process that doesn’t reveal any important areas of interest.

Continue reading “You’ll soon be able to get a 3D printed model of your brain” »