Lifeboat Foundation

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity went out of its way to investigate a rock the likes of which it has never seen before on the Red Planet. Measurements by Curiosity’s rock-zapping ChemCam laser and another instrument revealed that the target, a chunk of bedrock dubbed Elk, contains high levels of silica and hydrogen, NASA officials said. “One never knows what to expect on Mars, but the Elk target was interesting enough to go back and investigate,” ChemCam principal investigator Roger Wiens, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, said in a statement.

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It’s asteroids like these that will be (and to a certain extent already ARE) the economic engine that powers the first wave of human expansion from our homeworld out into the vast, unimaginably resource rich expanse of the greater solar system.

The near-Earth asteroid is an intriguing candidate for mining, said representatives of the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to begin these activities in the coming decades. Previous studies by Planetary Resources estimated that 2011 UW158 contains about $5.4 trillion worth of platinum, an element that is rare on Earth.

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Intel and Micron Technology on Tuesday unveiled what they touted as a new kind of memory chip that could “revolutionize” computing devices, services and applications.

Intel and Micron have a new way to store data that they say is denser, tougher, and faster than the competition, and it’s already starting production. In a live keynote today, the companies announced 3D Xpoint, a new category of non-volatile memory that claims to be 1,000 times faster than the NAND architecture underlying most flash memory cards and solid state drives. The new architecture does without transistors entirely, relying on a bulk material property change to switch bits from a low-resistance to a high-resistance state. From there, memory cells are layered in an intricate three-dimensional checkerboard pattern that Intel researchers say is 10 times denser than conventional memory.

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What happens when you combine a Tesla Model S with KITT from the TV show Knight Rider? The Youxia X.

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More luminous and energy efficient than LEDs, white lasers look to be the future in lighting and light-based wireless communication.

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It may look like Immortan Joe’s Citadel from Mad Max: Fury Road, but this abstract desert obelisk isn’t a citadel of the post-apocalypse. It’s a self-contained city—also called an arcology—that French firms Nicholas Laisné Associés and OXO Architects propose to build in the Saharan desert.

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A black hole isn’t the energy sink you might think it is. By hurling matter towards a black hole, it might be possible to get energy out of it. Learn how a spinning black hole could be an energy turbine for an entire civilization.

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Imagine what our night sky would look like if its stellar density was a million times greater than it is now. Remarkably, such places actually exist: They’re called “Ultracompact Dwarfs,” and astronomers are calling them an entirely new kind of galaxy.

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Is this what we will be fated to in the future?….Karaoke Robots.

“What Do Machines Sing Of?” is a robot by artist Martin Backes that endlessly performs number one hit ballads from the 1990s while attempting to add the proper emotion to its performances. When one song ends the machine randomly selects another and keeps on singing.

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