Lifeboat Foundation

Virgin Galactic’s tourist-carrying spaceplane has taken a step closer to entering service after its chemical rocket engine was fired for the first time in the skies over the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. With test pilots Mark “Forger” Stucky and Dave Mackay at the controls, the 60-ft-long (18 m) SpaceShipTwo VSS Unity pegged the speedometer at Mach 1.87 (1,424 mph, 2,290 km/h) within 30 seconds of igniting its engine.

Seconds before the strongest earthquake in years shook Southern California, hundreds of people received an alert on their cell phones, giving them crucial time to prepare.

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Yosemite Valley will close to the public Friday ahead of a powerful storm that could bring flooding to the area, officials said.

Visitors were asked to leave by 5 p.m. and all overnight reservations were canceled through Saturday night, according to Yosemite National Park officials who say the storm may cause “significant impacts.”

After the storm passes, authorities will assess road and facility conditions to determine when Yosemite Valley, home to many of the park’s picturesque waterfalls and cliffs, can reopen.

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“Be very, very afraid. As this extraordinary book reveals, we are fast sailing into an era in which big life-and-death decisions in war will be made not by men…and women, but by artificial intelligence” — @stavridisj’s review of @paul_scharre upcoming book Pre-order yours now:

A Pentagon defense expert and former U.S. Army Ranger explores what it would mean to give machines authority over the ultimate decision of life or death.

What happens when a Predator drone has as much autonomy as a Google car? Or when a weapon that can hunt its own targets is hacked? Although it sounds like science fiction, the technology already exists to create weapons that can attack targets without human input. Paul Scharre, a leading expert in emerging weapons technologies, draws on deep research and firsthand experience to explore how these next-generation weapons are changing warfare.

Continue reading “Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War” »

A technique based on genetic bar codes can easily map the connections of individual brain cells in unprecedented numbers. Unexpected complexity in the visual system is only the first secret it has revealed.

The Google Lunar Xprize, a decade-long competition to put a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, may have come to an anticlimactic end but organizers aren’t conceding defeat just yet. They have today announced plans to re-launch the competition, though with no current sponsor to speak of teams could be competing for bragging rights only.

Launched in 2007, the Google Lunar XPrize tasked competing teams with getting a privately funded spacecraft to the Moon before having it travel 500 m (1,640 ft) and transmit HD video and images back to Earth. It offered up US$30 million in prizes, though these went unclaimed as organizers finally pulled the pin in January following several deadline extensions.

Google had funded the original Lunar XPrize but will be taking no part in the relaunched competition, which means that no cash is currently up for grabs. XPrize is now seeking a new title sponsor for the competition, who would get naming rights and be responsible for offering up prize money for the winners.

Across Washington, WA — Hundreds of the virtually un-treatable “superbug” bacteria have been found in the U.S., including in Washington.

Slated to open in 2021, Aurora Station is now taking reservations.

Researchers have taken a step toward manufacturing solar cells from lead-free perovskites. High-quality films based on double perovskites, which show promising photovoltaic properties, have been developed in collaboration between Linköping University, Sweden, and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Research groups around the world are pursuing the potential of perovskites as one of the most promising materials for the development of cheap, environmentally friendly and efficient solar cells. In just a few years, the power conversion efficiency has increased from a few percent to over 22 percent. The perovskites currently available for use in solar cells, however, contain lead, and Feng Gao, senior lecturer at LiU, was appointed in the autumn of 2017 as Wallenberg Academy Fellow to develop lead-free double perovskites, in which a monovalent metal and a trivalent metal replace the divalent lead.

In the laboratory at the Division of Biomolecular and Organic Electronics, LiU, postdoc researchers Weihua Ning and Feng Wang have successfully manufactured single-layer thin films of densely packed crystals of double perovskites. The films are of extremely high quality and can be used as the active layer in solar cells, in which sunlight is absorbed and charge carriers created.

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