Lifeboat Foundation

Silicon Valley hydrogen fuel cell innovator Hypoint has inaugurated a new UK unit intended to speed development of its air-cooled aviation power technology, and ready it to supply zero-carbon power to next-generation aircraft like electric takeoff and landing vehicles (eVTOL) as they prepare to launch services.

HyPoint’s tech uses compressed air for both cooling and oxygen supplies delivered to its fuel systems, which are lighter, less polluting, have longer lifespans, and enable seven times more flight capacity than lithium-ion and other chemical batteries. Those attributes are luring developers of existing, new drone, and eVTOL craft to give emerging hydrogen cell products serious consideration as drivers of their vehicles – especially as the world seeks to reduce its carbon output. In 2018, aviation sector’s share of global CO₂ emissions was 2.5%.

A team of researchers from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) and the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), Brazil, has developed a new type of supercapacitor that can be integrated into footwear or clothing, an advance with applications in wearables and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

A supercapacitor is an electricity storage device, similar to a battery, but it stores and releases electricity much faster.

The researchers have devised a novel method for the development of flexible supercapacitors based on carbon nanomaterials. The new method, which is cheaper and less time-consuming to fabricate, involves transferring aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays from a silicon wafer to a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) matrix. This is then coated in a material called polyaniline (PANI), which stores energy through a mechanism known as pseudocapacitance, offering outstanding energy storage properties with exceptional mechanical integrity.

The activist Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine claims that macaque monkeys endured “extreme suffering” in a lab funded by Musk’s startup Neuralink.

Researchers have uncovered neural circuitry that allows the CA1 region of th… See more.

Summary: Researchers have uncovered neural circuitry that allows the CA1 region of the hippocampus to communicate with its counterpart in the opposite hemisphere despite there being no connection between them.

Source: RIKEN

Continue reading “How Left and Right Hippocampal CA1 Regions in the Mouse Brain Talk With Each Other” »

Byron Cook, the head of Amazon’s automated-reasoning (AR) group, think his field is entering a “golden era”, driven by a virtuous cycle of improving tools and b… See more.

Distributing proof search, reasoning about distributed systems, and automating regulatory compliance are just three fruitful research areas.

Titanium is the lifeblood of metal 3D printing. As the technology was initially driven by the aerospace and weapons sectors, it has become the metal of choice for its high strength-to-weight ratio. Now, Desktop Metal (NYSE: DM) has qualified titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V (Ti64) for its Studio Systems 2, making it one of the first office-friendly machines capable of 3D printing with titanium. One of Desktop Metal’s first customers in the space appears to be Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, whose new startup, Privateer Space, aims to clean up space junk.

YouTuber and scientist Derek Muller offers a look at Relativity Space, an aerospace company 3D printing orbital rocket parts, in a new video.

Matter and anti-matter are always thought of as opposites. If they interact, they turn into pure energy. But there are cases, thanks to the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics, where particles and antiparticles are somewhat coexisting. Now, a new particle can be added to those cases.

Oort Cloud comet C/2014 UN271, also known as Comet measures some 85 miles (137 km) in diameter, give or take 10.5 miles (17 km), reports a research team led by astronomer Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory. Their new paper on the mega comet has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, and you can sneak a peak of the preprint at the arXiv.

These latest observations confirm that Comet is the largest Oort Cloud object ever detected, as it’s nearly twice as big as comet Hale-Bopp (observed in 1997), the nucleus of which measured between 25 and 50 miles (40 and 80 km) wide. It’s also bigger than Comet Sarabat (observed in 1729), which had a nucleus measuring somewhere around 62 miles (100 km) in diameter.

Comet is currently inbound from the Oort Cloud 0, a distant region of the solar system known for packing billions and possibly trillions of icy objects. The comet will make its closest approach to Earth in 2031, when it will come to within 11 au of the Sun (1 billion miles), in which 1 au is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. The comet, coming no closer than Saturn, won’t likely be visible to the unaided eye, but astronomers will be keeping a close watch, as it’s turning out to be a rather extraordinary object.