Lifeboat Foundation

The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. The discovery opens doors to the creation of biological supercomputers that are about the size of a book. That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe. They’ve published an article on the subject earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which they describe a model of a biological computer that they have created that is able to process information very quickly and accurately using parallel networks in the same way that massive electronic super computers do.

Except that the model bio supercomputer they have created is a whole lot smaller than current supercomputers, uses much less energy, and uses proteins present in all living cells to function.

Doodling on the back of an envelope

Continue reading “Building Living, Breathing Supercomputers” »

Wifi distribution across this planet is patchwork of crazy: You can tweet from Mt. Fuji but lord help you if you want to send an email in Cuba. Thursday, Israeli company SkyFi announced it will be the one to finally soak the world in wifi from space.

In a press release announcing $3 million in funding from Jerusalem Venture Partners and the Liberty Israel Venture Fund, the company said it would get around the problems preventing reliable wifi from traditional satellites by launching nano satellites whose 55-centimeter diameter antenna could be folded up to make launching cheaper, then expanding once in orbit.

Continue reading “Can SkyFi Really Give the Entire World Free Internet?” »

Selfie Tennis on the HTC Vive is too much fun! w/Jenn Duong.

Conversation with a robot.

Q: What’s it like to have a conversation with a sex robot? A: Bonkers.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9xlw5jAu4kc

Rather than risk the lives of their astronauts, Russian government scientists are now working to develop humanoid robots that can perform complex tasks on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS) while astronauts control them safely from within the station.

The Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects, Russia’s military research arm unveiled two prototype robot astronauts on February 13th to the media ahead of a public robotics exhibition in Moscow.

Continue reading “Russian Robonauts Working on the ISS Will Soon be Reality (Video)” »

“Vulcan Inc. today announced a new exhibition of nearly 60 objects related to science fiction and the history of space exploration – Imagined Futures: Science Fiction, Art, and Artifacts from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection – that will be on view at its 3,000-square-foot flexible concept space, Pivot Art + Culture beginning April 7, 2016. The exhibition, curated by Ben Heywood, runs through July 10, 2016.”

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Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.

This new way to control electrical properties by slightly changing the device thickness instead of the materials could lead to new kinds of organic electronic devices with switching behavior or light emission that reacts to external factors.

Organic electronic devices such as OLEDs and organic solar cells use thin films of organic molecules for the electrically active materials, making flexible and low-cost devices possible.

Continue reading “Artificial control of exciplexes opens possibilities for new electronics” »

With the recent milestone achieved by the New Horizons mission, many are contemplating what our next space exploration goal should be.

The future of floating additive manufacturing.