Lifeboat Foundation

The night before the Space Shuttle Challenger was due to lift off, on January 27, 1986, Bob Ebeling tried to talk his boss out of approving the launch. Ebeling was an engineer for a NASA contractor, one of five who worried that the rocket boosters’ “o-rings” might turn brittle in the overnight cold, and that leaking fuel could lead to an explosion. Ebeling’s supervisor refused to stop the launch, and the shuttle exploded the next day, killing 7 astronauts, including a school teacher. A Presidential Commission would later vindicate Ebeling and his colleagues.

Over at NPR, Howard Berkes has written a moving remembrance of Ebeling, who was wracked by guilt for decades. The morning of the launch, Ebeling drove to work to watch the event from a company conference room. He was accompanied by his daughter:

“He said, ‘The Challenger’s going to blow up. Everyone’s going to die,’” [she recalled.] “And he was beating his fist on the dashboard. He was frantic.”

Neurons still remain the most powerful piece of computation machinery on the face of the planet. More to the point, nobody throws up their hands in despair when a screwdriver removes a flathead screw better than their fingernail can, and yet the parallel is an apt one. The circuitry of the human brain has not been honed by evolution to be especially good at playing the game of Go, any more than evolution has fine-tuned our fingernails for removing screws.

Which is not to say there is no room for surprise in today’s world of rapidly advancing technological achievement. What is more impressive, however, is when computers exhibit greater skill than humans at tasks evolution has been perfecting for millions of years like exercising a sense of smell. And yet such advancements are taking place right beneath our noses, metaphorically speaking.

Continue reading “Neurons on a chip let drones smell bombs over a kilometer away” »

Starting this year, any graduating high school senior who is accepted to one of Detroit’s five community colleges won’t have to pay a dime for tuition.

The Detroit Promise Zone program, officially launched on Tuesday, will make it possible. At first the funds will come from a private scholarship foundation. But starting in 2018, some of the money will come from property taxes already earmarked for the program.

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a high school senior preparing for college now or a second-grader whose college career is years away. The Detroit Promise will be there to help make a college education a reality,” said Mayor Mike Duggan.

Continue reading “Detroit makes community college free” »

Like a mirror image of Bedford’s Law, mathematicians have found a pattern in prime numbers that raises more questions than it answers.

“What it’s really like to have an autistic brain and how Einstein’s not the only genius who could have been dismissed for being different.”

Read more

Credit: David Wolfe

Thanks to the electrodes system a stable signal is obtained, which allows precise control like handling an egg without breaking. It also provides sensations as if it were a real hand.

The first prosthesis in the world that connects directly to the bone, nerves and muscles, allows the person to experience sensations, free mobility and is handled using the mind.

It was created by the Mexican Max Ortiz Catalan, who lives in Sweden, the device becomes an extension of the human body through osseointegration, this means that it connects directly to the bone via a titanium implant, and thanks to the neuronal and muscle binding interfaces a robust and intuitive control of the artificial hand is achieved, this way just by thinking about it is possible to move the limb.

Read more

The world’s first 3D-printed hotel suite is located in the Philippines. This is just the first in a series of 3D-printed buildings the designer hopes to create in the area.

Planning a vacation to the Philippines? Consider staying at the Lewis Grand Hotel, where a newly-printed room awaits its first guests. You read that right. The hotel, which is located in Angeles City, Pampanga, has the world’s first 3D-printed hotel suite.

Printing a Hotel Suite in 100 Hours

Continue reading “This Hotel Is 3D Printed from Sand and Volcanic Ash” »