Lifeboat Foundation

FINHAUT, Switzerland — Switzerland is adding a much needed cog in the wheel to its energy supply with an underground hydropower plant that says it has capacity to store enough electricity to charge 400,000 car batteries simultaneously.

Developers of the 2.2 billion Swiss franc ($2.30 billion) Nant de Drance plant in the canton of Valais, which came online in July, say the facility operates like a giant battery.

Its six turbines tucked in a cavern 600 metres below ground between the Emosson and Vieux Emosson reservoirs have capacity of 900 MW, making it one of the most powerful pumped storage plants in Europe.

Scientists experimenting on mice have found evidence that key parts of the modern human brain take more time to develop than those of our long extinct cousin, the Neanderthal.

New books on intelligence, medicinal cocktails, galactic history, and more.

Circa 2008

Marshall Space Flight Center.

A laboratory-model Hall-effect spacecraft thruster was developed that utilizes bismuth as the propellant. Xenon was used in most prior Hall-effect thrusters. Bismuth is an attractive alternative because it has a larger atomic mass, a larger electron-impact-ionization cross-section, and is cheaper and more plentiful.

Continue reading “Hall-Effect Thruster Utilizing Bismuth as Propellant” »

Circa 2009 o.o!!

The feat, done with magnetic fields, could lead to better understanding of zero-g bone loss.

Circa 2019

Mechanical stability of macroscopic structures on the millimetre-, centimetre-and even metre-scale could be realized by tailoring the anisotropy of light scattering along the object’s surface, without needing to focus incident light or excessively constrain the shape, size or material composition of the object.

According to a research paper published in Nature, astronomers detected a “really weird” object 4,000 lightyears distant from Earth. Every other minute, the object vanishes from view and produces a massive burst of radio waves three times an hour. Tyrone O’Doherty, a Curtin University student, first noticed the enigmatic object while scanning the sky in […].

The frightening future implications of new report from researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel caused a stir among observers of the international science community.

Using neither sperm nor egg, researchers created the world’s first synthetic mouse embryo and watched it grow for over eight days inside of a specially designed bioreactor that served as a womb, according to Live Science Magazine.

The article describes what occurs inside the artificial womb. “Within the device, embryos float in small beakers of nutrient-filled solution, and the beakers are all locked into a spinning cylinder that keeps them in constant motion. This movement simulates how blood and nutrients flow to the placenta. The device also replicates the atmospheric pressure of a mouse uterus.”

High-quality sperm means high-quality animals, but the process can be expensive or inaccessible. CRISPR-edited “surrogate sires” may provide a solution.