Lifeboat Foundation

By Jason Dorrier — SingularityHub

Our smartphones can do a lot—compute, pin down our location, sense motion and orientation, send and receive wireless signals, take photographs and video. What if you could also learn exactly what chemical components were present in any object? A new invention out of Israel aims to enable just that.

“The tricorder is no longer science fiction,” a recent Tel Aviv University (TAU) article declared. While a number devices in recent years have inspired similar comparisons, maybe this one is a little closer. Read more

By Katie Peek — Popular Science
As you fall feet first across an event horizon—the point where nothing can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull—you don’t feel anything change. But eventually, gravity is so much stronger at your feet than your head that you’re stretched apart, like Play-Doh, until you snap. Or at least, that’s the picture physicists drew after Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity in 1915. In the past few years, new possibilities for your untimely end have emerged.

The thought experiments attempt to resolve a paradox that physicist Stephen Hawking outlined in the 1970s. He showed that in their current forms, the two major pillars of physics—quantum mechanics and general relativity—can’t both be true near a black hole. General relativity governs how very massive objects work, while quantum mechanics governs how very tiny objects work. In most of the universe, physicists can choose which set of rules to apply—general relativity for a galaxy cluster, quantum mech­anics for a particle accelerator—but a black hole is both very massive and very small. Read more

Maddie Stone — Gizmodo

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how spider silk is this crazy wonder material that may soon find its way into everything from electronics to ultra-strong fabrics. Now, there’s another reason to be excited about spider silk: doctors might one day use the stuff to grow you a new heart.

Growing new organs and tissues outside the body is the bleeding edge of biomedical research. Just imagine: if doctors could grow replacement hearts or kidneys from a patient’s own stem cells, that patient would no longer have to face the agonizing prospect of waiting to find a suitable donor. The risk of organ rejection would become nil. But there’s a lot of R&D to be done before we get there. One initial challenge has been finding a scaffold material to grow organ tissues on—something that’s non-toxic, will not impede cell growth, and will not, itself, be rejected by the body. That, it turns out, is a pretty tall order. Read more

Researchers at Purdue University have shown how standard inkjet-printers can be employed to produce flexible electronic circuits from liquid-metal nanoparticle inks. This simple printing solution promises faster, cheaper, and easier production of stretchable, bendable electronics for clothing, soft robotics, and wearable devices. Read More

I read all the news about SpaceX’s Falcon 9 latest “failure” to land on an autonomous spaceport drone ship aka barge. I view these as trials to success. Here’s why.

1. Grasshopper Successes: The two videos below show that the early landing trials aka Grasshopper from several heights between 250m and 1,000m.

The lessons here are:

a) Pinpoint landing of a 1st stage rocket is technologically feasible.

Continue reading “SpaceX's Success” »

By Vivek Wadhwa — Singularity Hub

When I was in elementary school, about 50 years ago, teachers used to stand in front of a class of 40 or 50 children and write on a blackboard with chalk. To make sure the material was absorbed, the teacher asked occasional questions and assigned lots of homework. If students discussed their homework or helped each other in tests, it was called cheating, and they were punished.

Today, the blackboard has become a whiteboard; chalk has become a magic marker; the slates that students used have been replaced by notebooks; and classes have sometimes gotten smaller. Little else has changed. True, some schools are providing their students with laptops, and teachers are increasingly using technology and encouraging collaboration. But the methods are essentially the same—with the teacher dictating learning. Read more

By Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

When scientists looked at Mars through early telescopes, they saw a fuzzy, rust-colored globe scored by mysterious dark gashes some believed were alien canals. Later, armed with sharper images, we scoffed at such naiveté. Mars is obviously dry as a bone and uninhabited. Now, with a great deal more information from rovers and satellites, we believe Mars was once wet. As for life? The jury’s still out.

It shows how much we still have to learn (and are learning) about our solar system. Not too long ago, we only suspected one ocean of liquid water beyond Earth (on Europa). Now, thanks to robotic explorers, like NASA’s Dawn and Cassini missions, we’re finding evidence of oceans throughout the solar system. Read more

I have simple thinking in mind – like visualizing a rotating wheel suspended from its hub without friction so it can be pulled up and down easily.

You can trust that angular momentum remains constant (nature has a knack for that). But the wheel is also a clock. So if you lower it, it must go slower down there and become faster again when retrieved. It thus makes for a beautiful mental plaything (a “hot” one as the young people would say). Angular momentum can be called “L’hombre” (a macho word which is not quite right in Spanish). Can you feel L’hombre in your hand while moving up and down your toy in your mind?

The word “L’hombre” allows one to remember “L = ω mr^2 ” for angular momentum L in one’s mind forever. Omega (or ω) is the rotation rate, m the mass of the wheel’s rim (with a virtually weightless hub for simplicity), and r is the radius. So the wheel is now transparent to us like glass, right? What happens if ω is halved for simplicity as on a neutron star?

Either m must be doubled, or else r must be increased by square-root 2, or both m and r must have changed somehow in a compatible manner. How about m halved and r doubled?

Continue reading “Many people have ceased to claim that ‘thinking helps’ as Hewlett-Packard say” »

Brian Krassenstein | 3D Print

“Speaking with former MakerBot CEO, Jenny Lawton, at CES this year, she told me that 3D printing will become mainstream and really begin to explode as far as adoption rates go, when a full cycle of education has been exposed to the technology.” Read more