Lifeboat Foundation

SoftBank is pouring a massive $130 million funding round into the science fiction-invoking robots at Zymergen, which creates new microbes for corporations and government agencies.

GMOs can have a positive impact, but those that “escape” their intended environment may end up wreaking havoc on the natural ecosystem. To combat this, a team is developing a device that scans water samples to detect GMO-associated proteins in the wild, and help authorities respond to them.

Pitch black darkness and silence may help some people drift off at night, but others fall asleep better with music, TV or a fan on in the room. For the latter group, a white noise machine or app can be a handy bedside companion, but Cambridge Sound Management claims it has a better option with the Nightingale, a new Internet of Things-enabled system that uses two speakers in a room to create a “sound blanket” that is designed to blend into the background and block disruptive sounds.

Devices like the Snooz are designed to sit by the bed while they give off their comforting soundscapes, but according to CSM, when sound is coming from a single source a listener’s brain can pinpoint it, making it less effective at helping people switch off and drift off. To counter this apparent shortcoming, the Nightingale system comes in pairs, and placing them in different parts of the room creates a more uniform blanket of white noise that the brain can’t precisely locate.

Each unit contains two speakers, and when plugged into an outlet – actually two outlets –, outputs ambience from a selection of 15 different types of soundscapes. The company says the layout of the room is taken into account, and the devices will work even when plugged in behind furniture. Electrical outlet real estate is valuable, so the front of each unit contains two more outlets, to replace the ones it’s hogging.

For the first time, scientists have observed the formation of quasiparticles — a strange phenomenon observed in certain solids — in real time, something that physicists have been struggling to do for decades.

It’s not just a big deal for the physics world — it’s an achievement that could change the way we build ultra-fast electronics, and could lead to the development of quantum processors.

But what is a quasiparticle? Rather than being a physical particle, it’s a concept used to describe some of the weird phenomena that happen in pretty fancy setups — specifically, many-body quantum systems, or solid-state materials.

Continue reading “Physicists just witnessed quasiparticles forming for the first time ever” »

The ‘grandfather paradox’ of time travel has been puzzling philosophers, quantum physicists and novelists for years. Now there’s an answer as Cathal O’Connell reports.

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China is already well on the way to establishing its own version of America’s GPS network with its Beidou satellite constellation, but now it is seeking to take navigation and timing to stellar levels.

In November China will launch the X-ray pulsar navigation satellite — XPNAV-1 — a satellite that will conduct the world’s first test of the possibilities of using the regular emission of X-ray signals from pulsars for spacecraft navigation.

The spacecraft will attempt to triangulate its position relative to the Sun using the highly regular emissions from pulsars.

Continue reading “China to launch pioneering pulsar navigation satellite in November” »

Want to reach for the stars? Here’s how to do it.

What happens when Charlie Rose attempts to interview a robot named “Sophia” for his 60 Minutes report on artificial intelligence.