Lifeboat Foundation

We’ve been saying for ages that parents are among the best problem-solvers in the world, and the story behind Upsee confirms it. When Debby Elnatan’s second son Rotem was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, an umbrella term for a group of neuromuscular movement disorders that develop before birth or early in childhood, she decided that the physical therapists’ recommendations for Rotem to remain seated for most of the day weren’t going to work for her son. She wanted her little boy to move and walk and experience the world from a different viewpoint. The rub: he needed Debby’s help… a lot of it. So she took the matter into her own hands and crafted a device that would allow him to move with her, safely encouraging independence and helping to develop his muscles. Upsee is the result of years of tinkering with Debby’s original harness design to make it more comfortable, user-friendly, and ultimately more beneficial for the children using it. The current version includes different harness colors, an adjustable hip belt for the adult, and double sandals that allow the parent to help guide their child’s feet, effectively teaching them the movements of walking. Debby estimates that the Upsee has been sold in 100 countries: think about all those kiddos who are getting the thrill of walking for the first time!

“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

Continue reading “WTF Was That Thing Near the International Space Station?” »

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Every year, the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program puts out the call to the general public, hoping to find better or entirely new aerospace architectures, systems, or mission ideas. As part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate, this program has been in operation since 1998, serving as a high-level entry point to entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers who want to contribute to human space exploration.

This year, thirteen concepts were chosen for Phase I of the NIAC program, ranging from reprogrammed microorganisms for Mars, a two-dimensional spacecraft that could de-orbit space debris, an analog rover for extreme environments, a robot that turn asteroids into spacecraft, and a next-generation exoplanet hunter. These proposals were awarded $100,000 each for a nine month period to assess the feasibility of their concept.

Continue reading “NASA Invests In Radical Game-Changing Concepts For Exploration” »

It takes a bold person to declare that interstellar travel is now within our grasp. Physicist Stephen Hawking has shown that he is just that, taking part in the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. The project has announced a $100m research programme to investigate the technology of using light to propel spacecraft out of the solar system to explore neighbouring stars.

For the first time in human history, interstellar travel is a realistic and achievable aspiration, and not just the playground of science fiction.

So what has changed that makes interstellar travel achievable? First of all, clear expectations. This is not about a great big spaceship with a colony of astronauts travelling for generations to settle a planet around a distant star. Neither is it about faster-than-light travel, tunnelling through wormholes to arrive at the other side of the universe in an instant of time. This is about technology that already exists, or nearly exists, being applied in new and exciting ways.

Continue reading “Why sailing to the stars has suddenly become a realistic goal” »

Using a weird phenomenon in which particles of light seem to travel at faster-than-light speeds, scientists have shown that waves of light can seem to travel backward in time.

The new experiment also shows other bizarre effects of light, such as pairs of images forming and annihilating each other.

Taken together, the results finally prove a century-old prediction made by British scientist and polymath Lord Rayleigh. The phenomenon, called time reversal, could allow researchers to develop ultra-high-speed cameras that can peer around corners and see through walls. [In Images: The World’s 11 Most Beautiful Equations].

Israel’s Eximo has successfully completed a multicenter clinical trial of its laser system and unique catheters for treating peripheral artery disease, and after 100% successful Mexican and European trials it has now been approved by Israel’s Ministry of Health and administered to a patient at Beilinson Hospital.

Moove over.

Probably for as long as humans have contemplated their navels, they have sought to understand consciousness. Now, neuroscientists are making strides in developing theories to explain the phenomenon.