Lifeboat Foundation

It is meant to protect Israel’s natural gas platforms and shipping lanes.

Following a recent test, Israel’s Defense Ministry and Navy announced last week that the C-Dome, the naval version of its much-touted Iron Dome air defense system, is operational, The Times of Israel.

The Iron Dome system made it to the news during the conflict in the Gaza Strip last year, when it swung into action and blocked more than 90 percent of rockets fired at Israel. Following the successful deployment of the air defense system, the U.S. decided to procure the system from Israel. At the same time, it also inspired South Korea to build something of its own to thwart attacks from its northern neighbor.

IE organized a Reddit Ask Me Anything with Dr. Jonathan Blutinger, a postdoctoral researcher in the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University.

On August 29, 2022, Interesting Engineering

Continue reading “How complicated is printing 3D food? We have the answers” »

Secure communications provider Wickr has announced that it will shutter its free encrypted messaging app, Wickr Me, next year.

Wickr was founded in 2011 and became one of the first mainstream end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, until it was acquired by Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services in 2021.

In a post published Friday, Amazon said that Wickr Me will shut down for good on December 31, 2023. Amazon says the app will stop accepting new user registrations on December 31, 2022 before it’s discontinued completely the following year.

There have been 24 coronal mass ejections in the past week alone.

As NASA’s Orion spacecraft prepares to fly by the Moon, sky gazers can expect another little treat in the skies as a minor geomagnetic storm is expected to hit the Earth, EarthSky.

Over the past week, our Sun has seen some intense activity. Usually, when activity on the Sun increases, the chances of a geomagnetic storm on Earth also increase. Geomagnetic storms carry risks to infrastructure and communications on the planet. However, in the past week, our planet has been a bit lucky it wasn’t in the line of fire.

We will see on December 18 whether the prediction program is working or not.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup, also known as Qatar 2022, started yesterday, and its excitement has echoed worldwide. It is a matter of curiosity which nation will be the champion in this big event.

Continue reading “A prediction model claims Brazil will be the champion of World Cup 2022” »

The devices are so sensitive that even a soft tap is enough to make them glow. The researchers also made the devices glow by vibrating them, drawing on their surfaces, and blowing air on them to make them bend and sway—which shows that they could potentially be used to harvest airflow to produce light. The researchers also inserted small magnets inside the devices so that they can be magnetically steered, glowing as they move and contort.

The devices can be recharged with light. The dinoflagellates are photosynthetic, meaning they use sunlight to produce food and energy. Shining light on the devices during the day gives them the juice they need to glow during the night.

Continue reading “Algae-Powered Soft Devices Glow in the Dark When Squished or Stretched” »

Full episode with Stephen Wolfram (Apr 2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA
Clips channel (Lex Clips): https://www.youtube.com/lexclips.
Main channel (Lex Fridman): https://www.youtube.com/lexfridman.
(more links below)

Podcast full episodes playlist:

Continue reading “Cellular Automata and Rule 30 (Stephen Wolfram) | AI Podcast Clips” »

Gnawing on his left index finger with his chipped old British teeth, temporal veins bulging and brow pensively squinched beneath the day-before-yesterday’s hair, the mathematician John Horton Conway unapologetically whiles away his hours tinkering and thinkering — which is to say he’s ruminating, although he will insist he’s doing nothing, being lazy, playing games.

Based at Princeton University, though he found fame at Cambridge (as a student and professor from 1957 to 1987), Conway, 77, claims never to have worked a day in his life. Instead, he purports to have frittered away reams and reams of time playing. Yet he is Princeton’s John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics (now emeritus). He’s a fellow of the Royal Society. And he is roundly praised as a genius. “The word ‘genius’ gets misused an awful lot,” said Persi Diaconis, a mathematician at Stanford University. “John Conway is a genius. And the thing about John is he’ll think about anything.… He has a real sense of whimsy. You can’t put him in a mathematical box.”

The experiments demonstrated that the blood cells can sense when the environment outside the capillaries is low in oxygen – which occurs when neurons take up more oxygen to generate energy – and respond by rushing to deliver more. They also observed that this response if very rapid, occurring less than a second after oxygen is pulled out of the surrounding tissue.

This phenomenon is unique to the capillaries because of their size. The thin walls of the microvessels mean that the oxygen levels in adjacent brain tissue are mirrored within the capillaries, which can signal to red blood cells to spring into action.

The findings could have implications for a number of neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. It has been observed that blood flow in the brains of people with the disorder is impaired when compared to healthy brains. The difficulty in delivering the oxygen necessary for neuronal activity may help explain the cognitive difficulties that are one of the hallmarks of the disease.