Lifeboat Foundation

The U.S. government is getting more serious about dealing with the dangers posed by powerful sun storms.

On Thursday (Oct. 29), the White House released two documents that together lay out the nation’s official plan for mitigating the negative impacts of solar flares and other types of “space weather,” which have the potential to wreak havoc on power grids and other key infrastructure here on Earth.

The new “National Space Weather Strategy” outlines the basic framework the federal government will pursue to better understand, predict and recover from space-weather events, while the “National Space Weather Action Plan” details specific activities intended to help achieve this broad goal. [The Sun’s Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History].

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Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EM Drive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days, engineer Paul March took to the NASA Spaceflight forum to explain the group’s findings. In essence, by utilizing an improved experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust.

Isaac Newton should be sweating.

Flying in the face of traditional laws of physics, the EM Drive makes use of a magnetron and microwaves to create a propellantless propulsion system. By pushing microwaves into a closed, truncated cone and back towards the small end of said cone, the drive creates the momentum and force necessary to propel a craft forward. Because the system is a reactionless drive, it goes against humankind’s fundamental comprehension of physics, hence its controversial nature.

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“Should astronomers be allowed to build the TMT on Mauna Kea? This question raises concerns that we, as practising astronomers, see as a reoccurring issue within the scientific community.”

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South Korean scientists develop an electronic skin that uses a layer of graphene film to detect sound and temperature.

A team led by materials scientist at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea has developed rubbery plastic-and-graphene film that mimics the structure of human skin. The team claims that the film can accurately detect texture, temperature, pressure and sound. This marks the first time that an electronic skin has been able to demonstrate the ability to sense the entire spectrum of stimuli, and the team is hopeful that this technology can create practical artificial skin.

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I am in my mid 40’s. Hurry the fuck up.

In the most complete tally yet, scientists have identified nearly 1,500 genes that are connected to how we age.

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Paul March says Eagleworks has mitigated the issues raised by our Eaglework (EW)Lab’s Blue-Ribbon PhD panel and now Potomac-Neuron’s paper, on the possible Lorentz force interactions.

The issue was raised that there could be Lorentz Interactions with the dc currents on the EW torque pendulum (TP) with the stray magnetic fields from the torque pendulum’s first generation open-face magnetic damper and the Earth’s geomagnetic field.

EW built and installed a 2nd generation, closed face magnetic damper that reduced the stray magnetic fields in the vacuum chamber by at least an order of magnitude and any Lorentz force interactions it could produce.

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Most science starts off at the fringe and slowly makes it way to the mainstream. Cryopreservation is commonly achieved in a laboratory setting, but for many years serious applications remained confined to science fiction. Is it time to change how we see cryonics?

The science of freezing things

Scientific research requires great storage, and huge amounts of material including cells are frozen every day to be used at the later date. If you follow the correct protocols, many forms of life can be re-awakened after their cryogenic sleep. DMSO, propylene glycol and glycerol help abolish problems like ice crystals which can rupture cells, and storage temperatures can drop to below −120 °C. At these levels biological reactions are essentially halted.

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Phenylpiracetam, a water-soluble racetam, has neuro modulating and nootropic effects. Before any usage, it is beneficial to know the general dosages.

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A team of researchers with Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and Dong-A University, both in South Korea, has developed an artificial skin that can detect both pressure and heat with a high degree of sensitivity, at the same time. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes how they created the skin, what they found in testing it and the other types of things it can sense.

Many scientists around the world are working to develop artificial skin, both to benefit robots and human beings who have lost skin sensation or limbs. Such efforts have led to a wide variety of artificial skin types, but until now, none of them have been able to sense both pressure and heat to a high degree, at the same time.

The new artificial skin is a sandwich of materials; at the top there is a flexible surface meant to mimic the human fingerprint (it can sense texture), beneath that sit sensors sandwiched between graphene sheets. The sensors are domed shaped and compress to different degrees when the skin is exposed to different amount of pressure. The compression also causes a small electrical charge to move through the skin, as does heat or sound, which is also transmitted to sensors—the more pressure, heat or sound exerted, the more charge there is—using a computer to measure the charge allows for measuring the degree of sensation “felt.” The ability to sense sound, the team notes, was a bit of a surprise—additional testing showed that the artificial skin was actually better at picking up sound than an iPhone microphone.

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