Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: A novel aircraft design pioneered by startup Natilus could dramatically alter the cargo transportation industry, offering larger capacities, reduced emissions, and futuristic remote control options.

In the field of aviation technology, a groundbreaking blended-wing robotic aircraft presents a future where efficient and sustainable cargo planes are the norm. The company pioneering this effort, Natilus, has built a model that harmonizes ecological concerns with the need for faster and cost-effective transportation.

Drawing from the source article, the unconventional plane differs from traditional airliners with its distinct diamond-shaped body that facilitates a more spacious cargo hold. This design enables up to 60 percent more cargo to be carried compared to the current models in use. Furthermore, it notably claims to cut carbon emissions by half, a crucial development for an industry under increasing pressure to become more environmentally friendly.

The clip, which made the rounds on social media, showed the 7,000-pound truck with a Christmas tree loaded in its bed helplessly spinning its tires while slowly being towed up the hill by a white Ford truck.

The incident led to plenty of mockery. After all, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a big deal out of the Cybertruck having “more utility than a truck” during his incredibly awkward delivery event last month.

Even the local Stanislaus National Forest Service, which manages the National Forest where the truck got stuck, took the opportunity to issue a public service announcement, as spotted by the LA Times.

Tesla sparks innovation with wireless inductive home charging for EVs, signaling a bold leap toward a self-driving future.

December 2023 has been a rollercoaster for Tesla, with over two million vehicle recalls due to Autopilot issues. However, Tesla remains committed to advancing autonomous driving technology, and its latest move hints at a futuristic approach – wireless inductive home charging for electric vehicles (EVs).

Continue reading “Tesla’s big reveal: Wireless inductive home charger for EVs on the way” »

Tiny Vibrio natriegens pioneers eco-friendly biosorption for essential element extraction.

A bacterium weighing one-trillionth of a gram may soon have a large influence on sustainable processing of rare earth elements, as per a study by Cornell University.

Could Earth end up with a runaway greenhouse effect like Venus someday, and what could this mean for finding life on exoplanets? This is something a recent study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics hopes to address as an international team of researchers used a 3D global climate model to investigate if Earth is destined to develop a runaway greenhouse effect like the planet Venus, which precious studies speculate was once much like Earth long ago. This study holds the potential to bring awareness of the long-term consequences of climate change and what steps can be taken to mitigate the effects.

A Runaway greenhouse effect can turn a habitable planet like Earth with a surface liquid water ocean into an inhospitable planet like Venus. (Credit: Thibaut Roger / UNIGE)

“Until now, other key studies in climatology have focused solely on either the temperate state before the runaway, or either the inhabitable state post-runaway,” said Dr. Martin Turbet, who is a research scientist at CNRS laboratories of Paris and Bordeaux and a co-author on the study. “It is the first time a team has studied the transition itself with a 3D global climate model and has checked how the climate and the atmosphere evolve during that process.”

Much like the humans that created them, computers find physics hard, but quantum mechanics even harder. But a new technique created by three University of Chicago scientists allows computers to simulate certain challenging quantum mechanical effects in complex electronic materials with far less effort.

By making these simulations more accurate and efficient, the scientists hope the technique could help discover new molecules and materials, such as new types of solar cells or quantum computers.

“This advance holds immense potential for furthering our understanding of molecular phenomena, with significant implications for chemistry, material science, and related fields,” said scientist Daniel Gibney, a University of Chicago Ph.D. student in chemistry and first author on the paper, published Dec. 14 in Physical Review Letters.

At its Quantum Summit 2023, IBM took the stage with an interesting spirit: one of almost awe at having things go their way. But the quantum of today – the one that’s changing IBM’s roadmap so deeply on the back of breakthroughs upon breakthroughs – was hard enough to consolidate. As IBM sees it, the future of quantum computing will hardly be more permissive, and further improvements to the cutting-edge devices it announced at the event, the 133-qubit Heron Quantum Processing Unit (QPU), which is the company’s first utility-scale quantum processor, and the self-contained Quantum System Two, a quantum-specific supercomputing architecture, are ultimately required.

But each breakthrough that afterward becomes obsolete is another accelerational bump against what we might call quantum’s “plateau of understanding.” We’ve already been through this plateau with semiconductors, so much so that our latest CPUs and GPUs are reaching practical, fundamental design limits where quantum effects start ruining our math. Conquering the plateau means that utility and understanding are now enough for research and development to be somewhat self-sustainable – at least for a Moore’s-law-esque while.

Tesla has removed Disney+ from some of its vehicles amid Elon Musk having an online fight with Disney CEO Bob Iger. The fight started when Disney halted its advertising on X after Musk agreed with and amplified antisemitic content, for which he eventually apologized.

Every week, there’s a new drama with Elon Musk on X, formerly known as Twitter. It sometimes indirectly affects Tesla, but this time, it affects it directly.

The current drama stems from Musk giving support to an antisemitic post on X, which he didn’t initially apologize for, though admitted that it was a mistake a week later. He further apologized but was already attacking Disney. In the meantime, the result was a massive backlash, where many companies stopped advertising on X, including Apple and Disney.

“Electric water heaters offer a cheap way to store large amounts of energy, in the form of hot water. A heater with a 300-litre tank can store about as much energy as a second-generation Tesla Powerwall – at a fraction of the cost.”

Australia’s energy transition is well under way. Some 3 million households have rooftop solar and sales of medium-sized electric cars are surging. But as we work towards fully electric households powered by renewable energy, have we overlooked a key enabling technology, the humble electric water heater?

About half of Australian households use electric water heaters, while the rest use gas. So what’s so great about electric water heaters?