Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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UC Berkeley engineers have given new meaning to the term “working paper.” Using inexpensive materials, they have fabricated foldable electronic switches and sensors directly onto paper, along with prototype generators, supercapacitors and other electronic devices for a range of applications.

Research to develop paper electronics has accelerated in the last 10 years. Besides its availability and low cost, paper offers an intriguing potential: simply folding it could switch circuits on and off or otherwise change their activity—a kind of electronic origami.

But most efforts to fabricate electrodes onto paper with sufficient conductivity for practical use have employed expensive metals such as gold or silver as the conducting material, swamping the potential savings of paper as a substrate.

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John Bucknell created the pre-conceptual design for the SpaceX Raptor engine. It will be the advanced full-flow staged combustion rocket engine for the SpaceX BFR. He designed and built the subscale Raptor rocket for proof of concept testing able to test eighty-one configurations of main injector.

John Bucknell says the nuclear turbo rocket technology and his designs are ready for development. The air-breathing nuclear thermal rocket will enable 7 times more payload fraction to be delivered to low-earth orbit and it will have 6 times the ISP (rocket fuel efficiency) as chemical rockets. The rocket will have two to three times the speed and performance of chemical rockets for missions outside of the atmosphere.

The fully reusable nuclear rocket will be a single stage to orbit system which will be able to make space-based solar power several times cheaper than coal power. Using the 11-meter diameter version of this rocket to build space-based solar power will enable solar power at less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

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Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy. It regularly happens in your toaster, that is, if you make toast regularly. The opposite, converting heat into electrical power, isn’t so easy.

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have developed a tiny -based that can harness what was previously called waste and turn it into DC power. Their advance was recently published in Physical Review Applied.

“We have developed a new method for essentially recovering energy from . Car engines produce a lot of heat and that heat is just waste, right? So imagine if you could convert that engine heat into for a hybrid car. This is the first step in that direction, but much more work needs to be done,” said Paul Davids, a physicist and the principal investigator for the study.

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https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

Would you put on an exoskeleton that meant you could run for an entire day without getting tired?

What about one that would allow you to stay on your feet longer at work?

The technology to give people superhuman strength is currently being developed but the ethical questions about whether we should be developing it and in what circumstances it should be used, are only just beginning to be asked.

Continue reading “Exoskeleton that allows humans to work and play for longer” | >

Tactical Robotics’ Cormorant drone design allows it to navigate tight areas where a helicopter’s blades would get caught on the environment. The remote-controlled military drone can transport two injured people from a battle zone. The Israeli-based company believes the drone could one day also be used to inspect bridges, deliver medical supplies and spray crops.

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