Lifeboat Foundation

United Parcel Service Inc. is striking a series of drone-delivery agreements with health-care groups as it develops new technology pitched to the growing medical market.

The plans include expanding the use of drones to deliver cargo such as medical samples and supplies on hospital campuses in Utah and elsewhere, and an agreement with CVS Health Corp. to evaluate the use of drones for home delivery of prescriptions and other products, UPS said Monday.

The agreements are the first UPS has announced since the package delivery giant won U.S. regulatory approval to operate commercial drone flights through the company’s Flight Forward subsidiary. The nod from the Federal Aviation Administration paves the way for UPS to scale up operations as it competes with FedEx Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and others vying to develop drone delivery services in the U.S.

A new proposal scheduled to be released from the office of Senator Lee (R-Utah) tomorrow would put the airspace up to 200 feet in altitude over private property under the control of the property owner – and would restrict the FAA’s right to regulate airspace below 200 feet in altitude, making any zoning or regulatory decisions the right of the state or tribal entity governing the land.

DRONELIFE received a summary of the bill from Senator Lee’s office. We may not quote from the summary, as the bill is due to be released tomorrow. In essence, the bill seeks to clarify and control two significant legal issues that remain unresolved: 1) Establish the airspace to 200 feet in altitude above private property as under the exclusive control of the property owner; and 2) Establish state, tribal and local governments as having exclusive and absolute rights to regulate that airspace.

In summary, the bill would propose that the altitude between 200 and 400 feet be designated for the use of civilian drones – although it wouldn’t prohibit the FAA from allowing drones above 400 feet. The area under 200 feet would be under the jurisdiction of state, local and tribal governments – and the bill would call for a redefinition of “navigable airspace” to make that clear.

From some viewpoints, Mars is kind of like a skeleton of Earth. We can see that it had volcanoes, oceans, and rivers, but the volcanoes no longer fume and the water is all gone. A new image from the ESA’s Mars Express drives the point home.

The new image is of Nirgal Vallis, one of the longest dried-up river system on Mars, at almost 700 km (435 miles) long. It’s just south of the equator, in a region shaped not only by water flowing on the ancient surface, but by impacts.

Continue reading “This Dried Up Riverbed Shows that Water Once Flowed on the Surface of Mars” »

A crowdfunded startup wants to encourage homeowners to fight insect invasions with a natural enemy.

People who claim to have been abducted by aliens also say their DNA was manipulated and that human-alien hybrids live among us in this clip from Season 11’s episode, “The Returned”. #AncientAliens
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Continue reading “Ancient Aliens: Human-Alien Hybrids (Season 11) | History” »

Researchers in the lab of UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi have enabled, for the first time, determining whether the person behind a wall is the same individual who appears in given video footage, using only a pair of WiFi transceivers outside.

This novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, which they refer to as XModal-ID (pronounced Cross-Modal-ID), could have a variety of applications, from surveillance and security to smart homes. For instance, consider a scenario in which law enforcement has a video footage of a robbery. They suspect that the robber is hiding inside a house. Can a pair of WiFi transceivers outside the house determine if the person inside the house is the same as the one in the robbery video? Questions such as this have motivated this new technology.

Continue reading “Researchers’ new method enables identifying a person through walls from candidate video footage, using only WiFi” »

Imagine waking up every morning in a house that is just as alive as you are. With synthetic biology, your future home could be a living, breathing marvel of nature and biotechnology. Yes, it’s a bold ambition. But this kind of visionary thinking could be the key to achieving sustainability for modern cities.

Our current homes and cities are severely outdated. Dr. Rachel Armstrong, a synthetic biologist and experimental architect, says, “All our current buildings have something in common: they’re built using Victorian technologies.” Traditional design, manufacturing, and construction processes demand huge amounts of energy and resources, but the resulting buildings give nothing back. To make our future sustainable, we need dynamic structures that give as much as they take. We need to build with nature, not against it.

In nature, everything is connected. For the world’s tallest trees—the California redwoods— their lives depend on their connection to each other as well as on a host of symbiotic organisms. Winds and rain batter the California coast, so redwoods weave their roots together for stability, creating networks that can stretch hundreds of miles. The rains also leach nutrients from the soil. But fungi fill the shortage by breaking down dead organic matter into food for the living. A secondary network of mycelia—the root-like structures of the fungi—entwine with the tree roots to transport nutrients, water, and chemical communications throughout the forest. What if our future cities functioned like these symbiotic networks? What if our future homes were alive?

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The Mars Homes That NASA Awarded $500k

A mathematician has shared some of the brain exercises he uses to help people with dementia.

Gareth Rowlands, from St Albans, runs memory workshops at dementia cafes and care homes in Hertfordshire.

He became passionate about helping those with memory loss after he visited a care home which he wife ran in Barnet.