Lifeboat Foundation

Throughout history, humans have observed and sought inspiration from many aspects of nature to improve flight efficiency, maneuverability, and stability. And since the days of Leonardo da Vinci, nature-inspired design, also known as biomimicry or bio-inspired design, has played and continues to play a significant role in the development of aviation.

Now, in a paper published in Advanced Science, Masoud Akbarzadeh of the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and his former Ph.D. student Hao Zheng build upon the principles of biomimicry by drawing inspiration from the wing of a dragonfly to redesign that of a Boeing 777.

“Nature’s a great teacher in telling us how to optimize systems,” Akbarzadeh says. “And when you look at a dragonfly, you see wings that have evolved over millions of years into an incredibly lightweight, efficient, and strong structure.”

Teams of physicists worldwide have been trying to detect dark matter, an elusive type of matter that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light. Due to its lack of interactions with electromagnetic forces, this matter is very difficult to observe directly, thus most researchers are instead searching for signals originating from its interactions with other particles in its surroundings.

The PandaX experiment is a research effort dedicated to the search of dark matter using data collected by the Particle and Astrophysical xenon detector, situated at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) in Sichuan, in China. In a recent paper published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers involved in this large-scale experiment published the results of their most recent search for light dark matter (i.e., weakly interacting massive particles with masses below 1 GeV).

“Currently, strong constraints exist for heavy mass dark matter candidates derived from null results in direct detection experiments using xenon detectors,” Yue Meng, Qing Lin and Ning Zhou told Tech Xplore, on behalf of the PandaX collaboration. “However, traditional searches are not sensitive to light mass dark matter (less than GeV/c2) due to the detection energy threshold. Using an ionization-only signal (S2-only) to search for light mass dark matter can reduce the energy threshold from ~1 keV to 0.1 keV. Previous S2-only data analyses in xenon detectors were unable to model the background, which prevented effective and sensitive searches for light mass dark matter.”

Urban air-taxis can begin service over US cities as soon as 2028 by largely adhering to existing flight rules for helicopters and other low-altitude aircraft, according to federal regulators.

Nvidia says its new GeForce driver fixes long-running DPC latency issues, as well as adding support for a handful of new games and the GeForce RTX 4,060 Ti 16GB.

From comets to nebulas to the Milky Way, the shots shortlisted in the annual competition capture the beauty of the cosmos from Earth.

Clip taken from my conversation with Professor Dean Rickles. Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGIsZW2kgXI

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Discord invite: https://discord.gg/VnSjqmAgXx.

Continue reading “Dual aspect monism” »

https://www.youtube.com/user/ontologistics/ This is a brief presentation of a theory of mind called “Double Aspect Theory” which attempts to solve the mind body problem. It states that, in reality there is no gap or dual entities but simply 2 aspects, or epistemic perspectives of the same entity. For more on this theory please see the “ontologistics” channel by clicking the above link. Thx : )

Abstract: A scientific theory of consciousness could be merely descriptive, nothing more than a kind of empirical, statistical phenomenology. We already have a lot of data which fit into this kind of modest theorizing. Better would be a theory which reveals the nature of consciousness. Here a famous gap looms between any such theory of consciousness and a theory of the conscious brain, neither of which are actually in our possession. The gap is so serious and so immense that it has led to remarkable responses, such as the illusionist view that consciousness does not exist. I think the gap suggests there are lurking assumptions about the nature of both consciousness and matter which are fundamentally at odds with one another. A ‘neutral monist’ view may be able to avoid these assumptions to find a place in nature for consciousness and scientific theorizing about it.

It can go into extremely tricky spaces and stop humans from putting their lives in danger.

A student-founded startup, Revolute Robotics, from Arizona has built the Hybrid Mobility Robot (HMR) – a fully autonomous bot that can roll to its destination and even fly over obstacles in its path. If the concept sounds interesting, just wait till you see it in action. It’s mesmerizing.

Continue reading “This autonomous robot rolls to its destination and flies over obstacles” »