Lifeboat Foundation

A series of experiments using paper airplanes reveals new aerodynamic effects, a team of scientists has discovered. Its findings enhance our understanding of flight stability and could inspire new types of flying robots and small drones.

“The study started with simple curiosity about what makes a good paper airplane and specifically what is needed for smooth gliding,” explains Leif Ristroph, an associate professor at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and an author of the study, which appears in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. “Answering such basic questions ended up being far from child’s play. We discovered that the aerodynamics of how paper airplanes keep level flight is really very different from the stability of conventional airplanes.”

“Birds glide and soar in an effortless way, and paper airplanes, when tuned properly, can also glide for long distances,” adds author Jane Wang, a professor of engineering and physics at Cornell University. “Surprisingly, there has been no good mathematical model for predicting this seemingly simple but subtle gliding flight.”

Using a unique hydrogel, scientists in Saudi Arabia created a solar-driven system that successfully grows spinach by using water drawn from the air while producing electricity. The proof-of-concept design, described March 1 in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, offers a sustainable, low-cost strategy to improve food and water security for people living in dry-climate regions.

“A fraction of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to clean water or green power, and many of them live in rural areas with arid or semi-arid climate,” says senior author Peng Wang, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). “Our design makes water out of air using clean energy that would’ve been wasted and is suitable for decentralized, small-scale farms in remote places like deserts and oceanic islands.”

The system, called WEC²P, is composed of a solar photovoltaic panel placed atop a layer of hydrogel, which is mounted on top of a large metal box to condense and collect water. Wang and his team developed the hydrogel in their prior research, and the material can effectively absorb water vapor from ambient air and release the water content when heated.

Homomorphic encryption is considered a next generation data security technology, but researchers have identified a vulnerability that allows them to steal data even as it is being encrypted.

“We weren’t able to crack homomorphic encryption using mathematical tools,” says Aydin Aysu, senior author of a paper on the work and an assistant professor of computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “Instead, we used side-channel attacks. Basically, by monitoring power consumption in a device that is encoding data for homomorphic encryption, we are able to read the data as it is being encrypted. This demonstrates that even next generation encryption technologies need protection against side-channel attacks.”

Homomorphic encryption is a way of encrypting data so that third parties cannot read it. However, homomorphic encryption still allows third parties and third-party technologies to conduct operations using the data. For example, a user could use homomorphic encryption to upload sensitive data to a cloud computing system in order to perform analyses of the data. Programs in the cloud could perform the analyses and send the resulting information back to the user, but those programs would never actually be able to read the sensitive data.

Caption :

New research from MIT suggests that a certain type of computer vision model that is trained to be robust to imperceptible noise added to image data encodes visual representations similarly to the way humans do using peripheral vision.

The US Navy may be in possession of unimaginable technologies that could change the military, energy production, and even could alter the fabric of reality.

Please friends how true is this?

Electricity generated from human walking and vehicles on the road can power road lights and signals.

Researchers study cyanobacteria mats to show a correlation between oxygenation and planetary rotation leading to complex life emerging.

Could 2 B vitamins help those suffering with Huntington’s Disease?

T he Huntington’s disease (HD) community has recently experienced setbacks, but a new research report may reignite hope, from an unexpected source: the vitamin thiamine (B1), with help from biotin (B7). The investigators, from several institutions in Spain and UCLA, write in Science Translational Medicine, “Together, these results demonstrate a thiamine deficiency in HD brain and suggest that individuals with HD might benefit from thiamine and/or biotin supplementation therapy.”

Health care providers may suggest certain supplements for HD patients, based perhaps on a deficiency (vitamins C, B12, E) in the blood, or for general health. But the new findings are different. The researchers didn’t set out to detect a vitamin deficiency, but instead probed the messaging within cells in the HD brain, which led them to a biochemical juncture that revealed the thiamine/biotin connection.

Continue reading “What might explain Huntington’s Disease?” »

It happened on a November Sunday and portends a future where this Australian state could be off-the-grid by as early as 2025.