Lifeboat Foundation

A robot that uses artificial sweat can cool its motors without bulky radiators.

That’s why researchers are hard at work on ways to make spacecraft power systems more efficient, resilient and long-lasting.

“NASA needs reliable long-term power systems to advance exploration of the solar system,” said Jean-Pierre Fleurial, supervisor for the thermal energy conversion research and advancement group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “This is particularly important for the outer planets, where the intensity of sunlight is only a few percent as strong as it is in Earth orbit.”

Continue reading “No extension cord is long enough to reach another planet, and there’s no spacecraft charging station along the way” »

It’s the closest we’ve come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab.

Despite being self-driving, big rigs will still need truckers to ride along and take control of in case of emergency situations. But some say they may be the last generation to do their jobs.

Unfortunately I think the Pentagon is right. We are quickly heading into a dystopian future.

“Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a video created by the Army and used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University.

The video is nothing if not an instant dystopian classic: melancholy music, an ominous voiceover, and cascading images of sprawling slums and urban conflict. “Megacities are complex systems where people and structures are compressed together in ways that defy both our understanding of city planning and military doctrine,” says a disembodied voice. “These are the future breeding grounds, incubators, and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid threats.”

Continue reading “Pentagon Video Warns of ‘Unavoidable’ Dystopian Future for World’s Biggest Cities” »

My new story for Vice Motherboard on The Venus Project, Jacque Fresco, and a Resource Based Economy. I had the honor of visiting 100 year old Jacque Fresco last week. This story is also on the cover of Vice right now: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/eliminating-money-taxes-and…chnoutopia #transhumanism #Election2016 #ScienceCandidate #ResourceBasedEconomy #JacqueFresco #VenusProject

Futurist and architect Jacque Fresco speaks in parables. If he goes on too long with a story, his 40-year partner Roxanne Meadows interjects facts to keep him on track. Fresco recently turned 100 years old, and is the oldest celebrity futurist in the world. His magnum opus is The Venus Project, a 21-acre Central Florida Eden with white dome-shaped buildings that Meadows and he hand built over three and a half decades. The sanctuary and research center is where Fresco still leads weekly seminars, which includes a tour of 10 buildings—some filled with hundreds of future city models inside them—that highlight the promise of a future world where equality and technology abound.

How I met Fresco at The Venus Project this month starts with income taxes —something I hate and aim to one day eliminate altogether for humanity. Fresco doesn’t like taxes either. While searching online about taxes, I stumbled upon Fresco’s voluminous work: over 80 years of essays, filmed lectures, books, documentaries, models, and architectural drawings. Much of Fresco’s work is anchored by his main philosophical idea: a resource-based economy, where there’s not only zero taxes, but no ownership or money either.

Continue reading “Eliminating Money, Taxes, and Ownership Will Bring Forth Technoutopia” »

So it seems that the universe contains 10 — 20 times MORE galaxies than we previously thought.

I guess it’s *NOT* a small, small world after all!

Using the Hubble Space telescope and other observatories, astronomers have completed the most accurate census of galaxies in the observable universe to date. In terms of the actual number, let’s just say we were way the hell off.

Continue reading “We Were Very Wrong About the Number of Galaxies in the Universe” »

Breaks through the 5-nanometer quantum tunneling threshold; may allow for Moore’s law to continue…

The first transistor with a working 1-nanometer (nm) gate has been created by a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists. Until now, a transistor gate size less than 5 nanometers has been considered impossible because of quantum tunneling effects. (One nanometer is the diameter of a glucose molecule.)

Continue reading “Berkeley Lab announces first transistor with a working 1-nanometer gate” »

BT and Toshiba have showcased the UK’s first use of secure quantum communication at the telecoms company’s research and development centre in Ipswich.

The showcase demonstrates the use of quantum cryptography for communications over fibre optic cabling. By exploiting the quantum states of photons, the most visible elementary particles in the electromagnetic spectrum, the cryptographic technique can be used to communicate securely over normal fibre cables.