Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX is making good progress on Starship’s first two Super Heavy boosters, both of which could potentially be ready for their first major test campaigns before the end of the year.

On November 19th, some ten weeks after the process began, SpaceX craned Super Heavy B5’s methane (LCH4) tank on top of its oxygen (LOx) tank, marking the end of major structural assembly for the 69m (~225′) tall booster. A team of welders has since been working around the clock to weld the two tanks together and complete a transfer tube that routes methane propellant down through B5’s oxygen tank.

Two days prior, CEO Elon Musk shared a photo of SpaceX’s other Super Heavy booster (B4) which has been slowly progressing towards test readiness for more than three months. It’s unclear why SpaceX has been so sluggish to prepare Super Heavy B4 for testing but with B5 finally approaching the finish line, the company will soon find itself in a position where it will need to decide which booster to proceed with towards the program’s near-term end goal: the first orbital Starship test flight.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have succeeded in creating an experimental model of an elusive kind of fundamental particle called a skyrmion in a beam of light.

The breakthrough provides physicists with a real system demonstrating the behavior of skyrmions, first proposed 60 years ago by a University of Birmingham mathematical physicist, Professor Tony Skyrme.

Skyrme’s idea used the structure of spheres in 4-dimensional space to guarantee the indivisible nature of a skyrmion particle in 3 dimensions. 3D particle-like skyrmions are theorized to tell us about the early origins of the Universe, or about the physics of exotic materials or cold atoms. However, despite being investigated for over 50 years, 3D skyrmions have been seen very rarely in experiments. The most current research into skyrmions focuses on 2D analogs, which shows promise for new technologies.

For the last decade and more, Stem Cell research and regenerative medicine have been the rave of the healthcare industry, a delicate area that has seen steady advancements over the last few years.

The promise of regenerative medicine is simple but profound that one day medical experts will be able to diagnose a problem, remove some of our body cells called stem cells and use them to grow a cure for our ailment. Using our body cells will create a highly personalized therapy attuned to our genes and systems.

The terminologies often used in this field of medicine can get a bit fuzzy for the uninitiated, so in this article, I have relied heavily on the insights of Christian Drapeau, a neurophysiologist and stem cell expert.

For people with depression, finding a suitable antidepressant medication can be difficult and involve a lot of trial and error before finding one that works for them. Now a new study led by scientists at UT Southwestern has come up with a new imaging technique which the researchers claim will allow them to predict a person’s response to different types of antidepressant medication without sometimes having to spend months trying to find one that works.

The research first looked at the common antidepressant drug sertraline, one of a class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), comparing people taking the drug to those taking a placebo. Before they started the medication, participants had their brains scanned in an MRI machine, both while they were resting and performing a reward task. This was repeated again after they had been on the drug or placebo for 8 weeks as well as measuring how their depression had changed, if at all. People who had not responded to sertraline after this time were switched to another antidepressant called bupropion and underwent the MRI tests and evaluation of their depression symptoms again after 8 weeks.

With this data from over 300 people, the researchers used machine learning techniques to map which brain regions and circuits where associated with a response to each drug, allowing them to predict how other people might respond in the future.

Humans haven’t set foot on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. By the time they return to our cosmic neighbor by around 2025, the exploration landscape will be very different due to wide-ranging technological advances.

In a bid to further accelerate the technology that will power future lunar missions, NASA, alongside the Department of Energy (DOE) 0, has put out a press statement calling for companies to help it develop nuclear energy solutions.

The design is a cubic frame on six mechanical legs that looks like it emerged from futuristic sci-fi movies. The mobile home is able to traverse on almost any terrain including steep hills and mountain gorges with its mechanical legs that are enhanced with 2 inches (5 cm) of non-slippery rubber layers and two deployable spikes on the bottom of each piece for easy bolting on the ground.

The mobile home can lay its foundation while remaining uplifted from the ground, descending, or sitting on the ground.

The mobile home’s interior design comes with high-tech elements inspired by a futuristic architectural perspective. The windows of the mobile home are equipped with smart glass technology that can block sunlight when needed. Enchev also used automated furniture and smart technological gadgets in his design. With its integrated storage space, water tanks, and power cells, the mobile home enables its residents to live off-grid comfortably.

The auto industry is starting to get serious about solar.

Chinese automaker EdisonFuture, a subsidiary of renewable energy firm SPI Energy, revealed the EF1-T, its first electric pickup with a retractable solar panel roof last month.

Continue reading “China’s New Solar EVs Boast Up to 450 Miles of Range” »

It’s a web of endless possibilities, but there’s a chance we might find ourselves interwoven in the same old web of Big Tech.

The emergence of blockchain-based technologies such as cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, blockchain, and distributed ledger technology, etc is being seen as the herald of a new era of the internet — a more transparent and open version of the web that would be collectively controlled by users, instead of tech giants like Google and Facebook.

Continue reading “Web 3.0: The New Internet Is About to Arrive” »

Light is fast. In fact, it is the fastest thing that exists, and a law of the universe is that nothing can move faster than light.