Lifeboat Foundation

It is intended to be scalable and adaptable to a variety of settings, such as on the rooftops of inner-city buildings. The aim was to design and build a system that could be replicated in both rural areas and on roofs of urban building spaces.

The 130-square-foot structure is constructed from Aleppo Pine (Pinus halepensis) that was milled, dried, processed, and pressed into laminated wooden elements on-site at Valldaura. The glass roof, carefully arranged in a heliomorphic ‘diamond’ shape, allows for full solar capture both by the plants inside and the semi-transparent solar panels integrated within the glass to power the entire structure. The greenhouse only uses about 50% of the energy it produces, leaving the other half for the nearby Valldura Labs facility.

The solar-powered greenhouse also features a fully functional nutrient delivery system consisting of storage tanks, nutrient inflows, tubing to feed the plants directly, and a matrix of LED strip lights to facilitate longer growth cycles. The ground floor will be used for germinating the seedlings that will be planted in the gardens, while the upper level will generate a sizable harvest using advanced hydroponic techniques. All planting beds will use a sawdust substrate, a former waste product of the Green Fab Lab at Valldaura put to imaginative reuse.

By sending light through urine it’s possible to generate a hologram that can reveal the presence of bacteria or other signs of disease.

Interesting…

Slime that can be controlled by a magnetic field can navigate tight spaces and grasp objects, making it ideal for possible uses inside the body.

Continue reading “Robot made of magnetic slime could grab objects inside your body” »

It’s like “Venom” or “Flubber” come to life.

Scientists have created a bizarre magnetic slime that can be remotely controlled via a magnetic field, New Scientist reports. They’re hoping the odd entity could be used to navigate narrow passages inside the human body, likely to collect objects that were mistakenly swallowed.

Of course, that’s if you’re willing to swallow this thing and have it poking around inside of you — video footage of the thing certainly doesn’t make it look appetizing. In fact, people online are already cracking potty humor jokes about it.

5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G) is the fastest-growing segment and the only significant opportunity for investment growth in the wireless network infrastructure market, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. But currently 5G+ technologies rely on large antenna arrays that are typically bulky and come only in very limited sizes, making them difficult to transport and expensive to customize.

Researchers from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering have developed a novel and flexible solution to address the problem. Their additively manufactured tile-based approach can construct on-demand, massively scalable arrays of 5G+ (5G/Beyond 5G)‐enabled smart skins with the potential to enable intelligence on nearly any surface or object. The study, recently published in Scientific Reports, describes the approach, which is not only much easier to scale and customize than current practices, but features no performance degradation whenever flexed or scaled to a very large number of tiles.

“Typically, there are a lot of smaller wireless network systems working together, but they are not scalable. With the current techniques, you can’t increase, decrease, or direct bandwidth, especially for very large areas,” said Tentzeris. “Being able to utilize and scale this novel tile-based approach makes this possible.”

How can you prove that we may not be from here? The complexity of our DNA doubles every 600M years (Moores Law) so if you take the timeline back to where it intersects when life must have begun, it would be about 9.5B years ago, but the Earth has only been around for about 4.5B years. What gives?

This video is a short 1 min 12 second clip from a great documentary by Caroline Cory, “ET Contact: They Are Here”, available on iTunes:

Continue reading “Our DNA is Older Than Earth Itself — Where Did It Come From? — Oct 2, 2018” »

Robot Maid: The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture. It can even make and bring you coffee.

Remember the Jetsons? As kids, we hoped someday we’d have flying cars or those jetpacks Elroy used to zip around with. As we become older, the thing we really want most from the Jetsons is their lovable maid Rosie. Because let’s be honest, we all despise cleaning. Whether it’s vacuuming the living room, mopping up the kitchen or picking up our kid’s toys, nobody cleans with a smile on their face. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a robot maid like Rosie to clean up while we focused on other stuff?

Well having a “Rosie” might be closer than you think thanks to a company called Aeolus Robotics. They unveiled their as of yet unnamed “maid” robot earlier this year. The child-sized robot can mop, pick up stuff off the floor, put dishes away, and even move furniture.

Continue reading “This Robot Maid Can Clean Your House and then Get You Coffee” »

The information paradox may finally be resolved with the help of the holographic theory – but this time on a fractal scale.

Ever since Hawking predicted the thermal emission of black holes and their subsequent evaporation, the question arose as to where this information goes. In the context of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics – which states that the information about a system is entirely encoded in its wave function – information is always conserved. Thus, any loss in information, like that predicted by Hawking and his evaporating black holes, would violate quantum theory. This problem is known as the information paradox.

To resolve this paradox, physicists have been actively looking for a mechanism to explain how the information of the infalling particles re-emerges in the outgoing radiation. To begin, they need to determine the entropy of the Hawking radiation.

Artificial intelligences are promising in future societies, and neural networks are typical technologies with the advantages such as self-organization, self-learning, parallel distributed computing, and fault tolerance, but their size and power consumption are large. Neuromorphic systems are biomimetic systems from the hardware level, with the same advantages as living brains, especially compact size, low power, and robust operation, but some well-known ones are non-optimized systems, so the above benefits are only partially gained, for example, machine learning is processed elsewhere to download fixed parameters. To solve these problems, we are researching neuromorphic systems from various viewpoints. In this study, a neuromorphic chip integrated with a large-scale integration circuit (LSI) and amorphous-metal-oxide semiconductor (AOS) thin-film synapse devices has been developed.