Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 4,376

A team of scientists has developed electronic skin that could pave the way for soft, flexible robotic devices to assist with surgical procedures or aid people’s mobility.

The creation of stretchable e-skin by Edinburgh researchers gives soft robots for the first time a level of physical self-awareness similar to that of people and animals.

The technology could aid breakthroughs in soft robotics by enabling devices to detect precisely their movement in the most sensitive of surroundings, experts say.

Read more | >

A new video released by the Australian Army shows soldiers using a form of enhanced digital ‘telepathy’ to control robot dogs.

Unlike more well-known brain-machine interface technologies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the new system doesn’t use an implant. Instead, the system reads brain signals via an external helmet and then translates that information into commands for the robot dogs. Although still in the testing stages, robotic systems that can be controlled by thoughts instead of verbal or physical commands could offer a significant technological advantage to militaries of the future.

Enhanced Electronic telepathy’ a Potential Battle Field Game Changer.

Read more | >

Astronomers have discovered a white dwarf with unprecedented characteristics. It is simultaneously the smallest and most massive white dwarf ever observed by astronomers.

Astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility, which operates at the Palomar Observatory at California Institute of Technology, have discovered an extremely unusual white dwarf star with an extreme magnetic field nearly one billion times more powerful than the one of our Sun. The unique celestial object is both the smallest and most massive white dwarf discovered to date.

White dwarfs are dense, collapsed remnants of stars that were once about eight times more massive than the Sun. They form when stars literally shed their outer layers at the end of their life.

Read more | >

Recently, astronomers observing the sky received a shocking discovery. They found a large galaxy in a hitherto unexplored part of our galaxy. It materialized suddenly out of thin air.

So, how did the galaxy known as Crater 2 accomplish this, similar to a deer springing from cosmic bushes to look into our collective headlights? Although Crater 2 may appear to have suddenly appeared, he has been around the entire time. We just disregarded it.

However, now that we are aware of its existence, astronomers have uncovered a number of embarrassing characteristics. We cannot ascribe the galaxy’s relative obscurity to its size to begin with. Crater 2 is so enormous that it has already been identified as the fourth biggest galaxy inside the orbit of our galaxy. We also cannot blame its remoteness. Crater 2’s orbit around the Milky Way brings it directly overhead.

Read more | >

Researchers have discovered a new, innermost layer nestled inside our planet’s inner core, a 400-miles solid metallic ball that responds to the reverberating shockwaves of earthquakes in an unexpected way.

As detailed in a new paper published this week in the journal Nature Communications, a team of two seismologists from the Australian National University found that the Earth has an “innermost inner core,” which may have been formed following a “significant global event from the past.”

“Clearly, the innermost inner core has something different from the outer layer,” lead author Thanh-Son Pham, a seismologist at the Australian National University, told The Washington Post. “We think that the way the atoms are [packed] in these two regions are slightly different.”

Read more | >

The human fingertip is an exquisitely sensitive instrument for perceiving objects in our environment via the sense of touch. A team of Chinese scientists has mimicked the underlying perceptual mechanism to create a bionic finger with an integrated tactile feedback system capable of poking at complex objects to map out details below the surface layer, according to a recent paper published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“We were inspired by human fingers, which have the most sensitive tactile perception that we know of,” said co-author Jianyi Luo of Wuyi University. “For example, when we touch our own bodies with our fingers, we can sense not only the texture of our skin, but also the outline of the bone beneath it. This tactile technology opens up a non-optical way for the nondestructive testing of the human body and flexible electronics.”

According to the authors, previously developed artificial tactile sensors could only recognize and discriminate between external shapes, surface textures, and hardness. But they aren’t capable of sensing subsurface information about those materials. This usually requires optical technologies, such as CT scanning, PET scans, ultrasonic tomography (which scans the exterior of a material to reconstruct an image of its internal structure), or MRIs, for example. But all of these methods also have drawbacks. Similarly, optical profilometry is often used to measure the surface’s profile and finish, but it only works on transparent materials.

Read more | >

It hasn’t existed since the beginning of time itself, but now scientists have managed to create what they call quark soup. This substance is believed to be the smallest, hottest, and densest state of our universe and the very “soup” that allowed the universe to grow and expand into what we know it as today.

The feat was made possible thanks to a powerful yet very complicated particle accelerator. According to research featured in a video by Scientific American, the universe began as a quark soup — the smallest, most fundamental building blocks of our atoms. Scientists say these quarks floated in a fluid-like force that held them all together inside their proton and neutrons.

These particles, the researchers say, are called gluons. As such, the plasma-like fluid that helped create our universe, the quark soup that they have recreated here, is more formally called quark-gluon plasma. And it hasn’t been found in nature since the beginning of time, as far as we know. But by using a particle accelerator located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, scientists were able to recreate it.

Read more | >