Lifeboat Foundation

Space is a deep, dark, vast abyss that exists between the cosmos, separating them from each other. But is it truly as empty as we think it is? Or is the vacuum that spans everywhere hiding something from us? Something mysterious, and perhaps the most powerful source of energy?

Zero-point energy, also known as vacuum energy, has been touted as a potentially limitless and ubiquitous source of energy, if one could only find the means to harness it.

Continue reading “This Energy Is Floating All Around Space. Can We Harness it?” »

An AI-powered camera system reduces wind turbine bird fatalities by stopping the turbine as soon as it spots birds. Read it here.

What is time? Why is it so different from space? And where did it come from? Scientists are still stumped by these questions — but working harder than ever to answer them.

St. Augustine said of time, “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain to him who asks, I don’t know.” Time is an elusive concept: We all experience it, and yet, the challenge of defining it has tested philosophers and scientists for millennia.

It wasn’t until Albert Einstein that we developed a more sophisticated mathematical understanding of time and space that allowed physicists to probe deeper into the connections between them. In their endeavors, physicists also discovered that seeking the origin of time forces us to confront the origins of the universe itself.

Continue reading “The struggle to find the origins of time” »

Aircrafts transport people, ship goods, and perform military operations, but the petroleum-based fuels that power them are in short supply. In research publishing on June 30 in the journal Joule, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab have found a way to generate an alternative jet fuel by harvesting an unusual carbon molecule produced by the metabolic process of bacteria commonly found in soil.

“In chemistry, everything that requires energy to make will release energy when it’s broken,” says lead author Pablo Cruz-Morales, a microbiologist at DTU Biosustain, part of the Technical University of Denmark. When petroleum jet fuel is ignited, it releases a tremendous amount of energy, and the scientists at the Keasling Lab at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory thought there must be a way to replicate this without waiting millions of years for new fossil fuels to form.

Jay Keasling, a chemical engineer at University of California, Berkeley, approached Cruz-Morales, who was a postdoc in his lab at the time, to see if he could synthesize a tricky molecule that has the potential to produce a lot of energy. “Keasling told me: it’s gonna be an explosive idea,” says Cruz-Morales.

Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have sparked interest from governments that would like to use these tools for predictive policing to deter crime. Early efforts at crime prediction have been controversial, however, because they do not account for systemic biases in police enf…

A Northwestern University-led team of researchers has developed a small, soft, flexible implant that relieves pain on demand and without the use of drugs. The first-of-its-kind device could provide a much-needed alternative to opioids and other highly addictive medications.

The quirky temperature dependence of liquid silica’s viscosity comes from the liquid equivalent of crystal defects, according to new simulations.

Using radioactive tritium, scientists improve laboratory constraints on the overdensity signal of cosmic relic neutrinos by a factor of 100, an advance that should improve the chances of spotting this elusive particle.

Using radioactive tritium, scientists improve laboratory constraints on the overdensity signal of cosmic relic neutrinos by a factor of 100, an advance that should improve the chances of spotting this elusive particle.

Centimeter-scale objects in liquid can be manipulated using the mutual attraction of two arrays of air bubbles in the presence of sound waves.

Assembling small components into structures is a fiddly business often encountered in manufacturing, robotics, and bioengineering. Some existing approaches use magnetic, electrical, or optical forces to move and position objects without physical contact. Now a team has shown that acoustic waves can create attractive forces between centimeter-scale objects in water, enabling one such object to be accurately positioned above another [1]. The scheme uses arrays of tiny, vibrating air bubbles that provide the attractive force. This acoustic method requires only simple equipment and could provide a cheap, versatile, and gentle alternative technique for object manipulation.

Researchers are developing techniques that use acoustic waves to position objects such as colloidal particles or biological cells. Attractive forces are produced by the scattering of sound waves from the objects being manipulated. One limitation of this approach, however, is that positioning is more accurate with waves of higher frequency (and thus smaller wavelength), but higher frequencies are also more strongly absorbed and attenuated by many materials.