Lifeboat Foundation

Pod transportation company, Skytran, has received $32.5 million in funding. Skytran is a NASA Space Act company that is developing a pod-based personal rapid transportation system.

Some of the funding is from former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt.

They will have a network of computer-controlled, 2-person jet-like vehicles using SkyTran magnetic levitation technology.

Continue reading “Skytran magnetic levitation personal pod transportation gets $32.5 million in funding” »

Closing the infrastructure gap before the year 2050 by strengthening existing infrastructure with ET3 is entirely feasible and it can be achieved in three coordinated phases:

1) bringing ET3 to maturity, including full-scale commercial deployment (2−5 years); 2) expanding ET3 networks around the globe at national levels (30 years); 3) connecting national ET3 networks into the international network (15 years) and creating one city called Earth.

Dreams are so strange and carry so much significance to us that we often feel the need to tell people about our nocturnal adventures, sometimes at tedious length.

But if you understand what goes on inside the brain as dreams take their course, they start to make a lot more sense. And dreams are much more important than you might think.

Here are some common questions answered about the nighttime hallucinations we call dreams.

Continue reading “Science Is Getting Closer to Understanding What Goes on Inside The Mind When We Dream” »

MIT spin off company Ayar Labs is combining light and electronics to create faster, more efficient computers. The new optoelectronic chips are designed to speed up data transmission to and from conventional processor chips in a way that will also reduce energy consumption in chip-to-chip communications by 95 percent and could cut overall energy usages by large data firms by up to 50 percent.

Since the invention of the silicon chip 60 years ago, the power of computers has doubled every two years, but the speed at which computer systems work hasn’t shown quite such dramatic progress. The problem is one of data transmission and the bottlenecks that any technology runs into, slowing down the whole to the speed of its most sluggish part.

Think of a computer as like an air passenger system. If you concentrate on the aircraft, airport runway architecture, supply logistics, and air traffic control, it’s easy to speed up travel between, for example, New York and Washington DC to under one hour. That sounds fantastic, but if it takes you two hours to get through security at one hand and another two hours to collect your baggage at the other, then it’s faster to drive.

A new laser-based field instrument developed by a collaborative team of researchers can quantify methane leaks as tiny as 1/4 of a human exhalation from nearly…a mile away. The system, constructed around a dual-frequency comb spectrometer, provides efficient, accurate data collection at a fraction of the cost of previous technologies. The research was partially funded by DARPA’s Spectral Combs from UV to THz (SCOUT) program.

SenseTime Group Ltd. has raised $600 million from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and other investors at a valuation of more than $3 billion, becoming the world’s most valuable artificial intelligence startup.

Big technology companies seem to be waging a war on humankind’s long-standing intellectual tradition, according to author Franklin Foer, who shows us how to fight back.

We’re never short of reasons to look up at the night sky — whether it’s the rare second blue moon we were just treated to, or a meteor shower.

But in case you need a little motivation to get out of the house and into the fresh air this month, we have a beautiful one for you: checking out the ever-changing celestial geometry above our heads.

This April, the gas giant Jupiter forms a rare and fleeting triangle with two bright stars in our night sky, and it’ll be visible with the naked eye if you know where to look.

Continue reading “Jupiter Forms a Triangle in The Night Sky This Month. Here’s How to See It” »

Imagine driving and being warned when you’re too close to the edge of the road.

That’s exactly what space technology developed by German researchers can do, and it could be in Northland trucks in the next year.

Researchers from the German Aerospace Agency have been in Whangarei with the Intelligent Positioning System, which has been designed to navigate the rover on Mars.