Lifeboat Foundation

An in-depth survey of the various technologies for spaceship propulsion, both from those we can expect to see in a few years and those at the edge of theoretical science. We’ll break them down to basics and familiarize ourselves with the concepts.
Note: I made a rather large math error about the Force per Power the EmDrive exerts at 32:10, initial tentative results for thrust are a good deal higher than I calculated compared to a flashlight.

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Continue reading “The Spaceship Propulsion Compendium” »

The UK @Ministry of Defence #Defence Science and #Technology Laboratory (Dstl) has hosted the UK’s first high-powered, long-range #Laser Directed Energy Weapon (LDEW) trial on its ranges at Porton Down.

The trials involve firing the UK #DragonFire demonstrator at a number of targets over a number of ranges, demanding pinpoint accuracy from the beam director.

Continue reading “DragonFire | Next Generation Laser | Dstl” »

Plastic waste is clogging up our rivers and oceans and causing long-lasting environmental damage that is only just starting to come into focus. But a new approach that combines biological and chemical processes could greatly simplify the process of recycling it.

While much of the plastic we use carries symbols indicating it can be recycled, and authorities around the world make a big show about doing so, the reality is that it’s easier said than done. Most recycling processes only work on a single type of plastic, but our waste streams are made up of a complex mixture that can be difficult and expensive to separate.

On top of that, most current chemical recycling processes produce end products of significantly worse quality that can’t be recycled themselves, which means we’re still a long way from the goal of a circular economy when it comes to plastics.

A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks to a unique lattice structure with connections of variable stiffness, as described in a new paper by my colleagues and me.

The new material is a type of architected material, which gets its properties mainly from the geometry and specific traits of its design rather than what it is made out of. Take hook-and-loop fabric closures like Velcro, for example. It doesn’t matter whether it is made from cotton, plastic or any other substance. As long as one side is a fabric with stiff hooks and the other side has fluffy loops, the material will have the sticky properties of Velcro.

My colleagues and I based our new material’s architecture on that of an artificial neural network—layers of interconnected nodes that can learn to do tasks by changing how much importance, or weight, they place on each connection. We hypothesized that a mechanical lattice with physical nodes could be trained to take on certain mechanical properties by adjusting each connection’s rigidity.

Based on marketing activation events the company ran over the summer in Seattle, Austin, and Palo Alto, the outlook for their first product looks pretty rosy. They gave away bags of salad (which were clearly labeled as being gene-edited) consisting of red-and green-leaf mustard greens, and asked people to complete a short survey about it. Adams estimated that more than 6,000 people tried the salads, and over 90 percent responded that they were “very motivated” or “somewhat motivated” to buy the product.

A New Green Revolution?

Continue reading “From Pitless Cherries to Softer Kale, This Startup Is Using CRISPR to Make Better Produce” »

A molecular ratchet, in which a crown ether is pumped from solution onto an encoded molecular strand by a pulse of chemical fuel, opens the way for the reading of information along molecular tapes.

Use my link http://www.audible.com/isaac or text “ISAAC” to 500–500 to get a free book including a copy of Olaf Stapledon’s “Star Maker“
Without the Sun our world would be a frozen wasteland, and for this reason any efforts to colonize the galaxy must focus on huddling in the tiny oases of warmth around stars, separated from each other by enormous gulfs of interstellar space. But what if we could make our own stars at the places of our choosing? And can we merely mimic nature or create stars unlike anything which nature has formed?

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Scientists have found new similarities between Human Brains and current Artificial Intelligence models which clearly show that in general, there’s not a lot of things needed except for more and better hardware, and some more improvements in efficiency for Artificial Intelligence to beat Humans in nearly every imaginable field.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 More Similar than not… 01:37 How AI and us perceive Time 04:19 What is Artificial General Intelligence 05:57 When can we expect AGI? 07:12 Last Words — #ai #agi #humans …
01:37 How AI and us perceive Time.
04:19 What is Artificial General Intelligence.
05:57 When can we expect AGI?
07:12 Last Words.
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#ai #agi #humans

In a new study published in the journal PLOS Biology, a team of researchers at University College London posit that it became the “universal currency of life” by way of a little thing known as phosphorylation.

Basically, phosphorylation is the process by which ATP is created. A phosphate molecule is added to another chemical called ADP, and voíla: ATP is born. That same phosphate, as ScienceAlert explains, is then used for another process called hydrolysis, or the reaction of an organic chemical with water that breaks down ATP for use — and that connection with water may be where the secret to ATP’s metabolic dominance lies.

Well, partly. As the scientists discovered in their research, ATP couldn’t rise to the top alone. It needed both water and another phosphorylating molecule, called AcP, to do it. And in fact, it’s likely that ATP actually knocked out AcP as top energy-giving dog.