Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 11609

The future of movies and manufacturing may be in 3D, but electronics and photonics are going 2-D; specifically, two-dimensional semiconducting materials.

One of the latest advancements in these fields centers on (MoS2), a two-dimensional semiconductor that, while commonly used in lubricants and steel alloys, is still being explored in optoelectronics.

Recently, engineers placed a single layer of MoS2 molecules on top of a photonic structure called an optical nanocavity made of aluminum oxide and aluminum. (A nanocavity is an arrangement of mirrors that allows beams of light to circulate in closed paths. These cavities help us build things like lasers and optical fibers used for communications.)

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Check out LEAF President Keith Comito explain the origin of Lifespan.io and why crowdfunding research to extend healthy lifespan is both important and exciting.

Our current campaign is here: https://www.lifespan.io/campaigns/the-major-mouse-testing-program/ and there will be more to follow soon! Connect with us on social media and subcribe on YouTube to stay informed. #CrowdfundTheCure #LifespanIO

LEAF President Keith Comito explains the origin of Lifespan.io — a crowdfunding platform specifically for biomedical research aimed at extending healthy human lifespan. Learn more, and help us Crowdfund the Cure for Aging: https://www.lifespan.io

Continue reading “Crowdfunding the Cure for Aging | Life Extension Research, LifespanIO, and You” | >

A new measurement of the dust around KIC 8462852 reveals that it seems to be consistent with the breakup of a cluster of Halley-like comets.

The Kepler satellite was designed to search for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of stars by measuring dips in a star’s brightness as orbiting planets move across the stellar disc (transits). Its sensitive camera stares at more than 150,000 stars towards the constellations of Cygnus and Lyrae, and so far has found over 5000 exoplanet candidates. But Kepler also monitors the light fluctuations in all the other stars, even dips not caused by transits, and has found some bizarre situations. Perhaps the strangest is the case of KIC 846852, an otherwise normal star slightly larger than the Sun that has exhibited significant, irregular dips in the flux that last as short as a few days or as long as eighty days, and are as deep as 20%. The source is so far unique in the Kepler database.

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A hybrid hydrostatic transmission and human-safe haptic telepresence robot (credit: Disney Research)

A human-safe lifelike telepresence robot with the delicacy and precision needed to pick up an egg without breaking it or thread a sewing needle has been developed by researchers at Disney Research, the Catholic University of America, and Carnegie Mellon University.

The secret: a hydrostatic transmission that precisely drives robot arms, offering extreme precision with almost no friction or play.

The hybrid transmission design also makes it possible to halve the number of bulky hydraulic lines that a fully hydraulic system would require and allows for making its robotic limbs lighter and smaller, said John P. Whitney, an assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, who led the development of the transmission while an associate research scientist at Disney Research.

Continue reading “A robot with human-like grace and precision” | >

BLOOMINGTON, Ill.— An international team of physicists including Illinois Wesleyan University Professor of Physics Gabe Spalding has shown waves of light can seem to travel back in time.

It may seem like science fiction, but the experiment did not violate the laws of physics. Spalding, his physics student Joseph Richards ’16 and a team of scientists tackled a century-old intuition from Lord Rayleigh regarding the speed of sound. Rayleigh theorized that music being played on an object traveling faster than the speed of sound, a supersonic jet for example, would result in a listener hearing the music playing in reverse. The Spalding team simulated what an observer standing still would see when looking at a superluminal (faster than the speed of light) occurrence. The results of the scientists’ experiment, conducted last summer at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, have been published in Science Advances.

“The existence of an absolute limit, the speed of light, is the natural source of the question: what would happen if we cross this limit?” lead author Mattero Clerici told a writer for a post on IFLScience. “Light sources, however, may move faster than the speed of light when their speed is not associated with the physical motion of matter. Following this line of thought, we devised a way to experimentally investigate the [effects] of superluminal motion.”

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