Lifeboat Foundation

Current night vision (NV) devices are bulky and heavy, resulting in a significant torque on the wearer’s neck. This torque greatly limits the wearer’s agility and often leads to chronic injury over prolonged use. Additionally, existing NV devices only provide a narrow field of view (FOV) and are limited to the near-infrared (IR) spectral bands, greatly limiting situational awareness in varied night conditions. ENVision seeks to leverage recent advances in planar optics and transduction materials to develop NV systems that don’t require bulky image intensifiers, provide wider FOV, offer enhanced visual access across IR bands, and are lightweight to reduce neck strain.

Five teams were chosen to develop multi-band, wide FOV planar optics and planar image intensifiers that impose near-zero neck torque on the wearer. Another five teams were selected to explore new methods to amplify photonic up-conversion processes from any IR band to visible light to enable future “intensifier-free” night vision systems.

For listing of the teams selected visit: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-12a

A century after the quantum revolution, a lot of uncertainty remains.

Tricking cows into thinking they’re outside has lowered stress levels, and increased milk production.

The new space race is playing out in real-time on social media.

With the help of fans on Reddit, SpaceX’s space race is playing out in real-time. SpaceX can get its Falcon 9 to launch, but the community gets people to care.

Kamose, the last king of the Theban Seventeenth Dynasty, refers to Apepi as a “Chieftain of Retjenu” in a stela that implies a Levantine background for this Hyksos king. A ‘normative inversion’ (cite Maimonides, John Spencer, Freud et al) turns the anti-Kemetic Hyksos monotheistic Set of Avaris into the equally sociopathic plague-maker of Exodus and Genesis. Two sides of the same monotheistic coin? Monotheism takes roots from the banning (and/or eradication) of all rival cults. https://core.ac.uk/reader/45268640

Egyptian accounts support Manetho and his implication that Moses is King Apophis or final Hyksos king Khamudi, “Josephus associated the Hyksos with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Many modern scholars believe the Hyksos may have partially inspired the Biblical account.” Geraty, L. T. (2015). “Exodus Dates and Theories”. In Thomas E. Levy; Thomas Schneider; William H.C. Propp (eds.). Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplina ry Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer. pp. 55–64. ISBN 978−3−319−04768−3.

“This is a great struggle between the truth and the delusion. This whole material world is in reality a prison for our souls, and its creator who is ignorantly revered as the supreme God by the Jews and Christians (and later also Muslims), is in fact a fallen angel, Ptahil, who listened to the whispering of the King of Darkness.”

A pig’s heart in a human? The bold frontier of xenotransplantation shows just how quickly medical science is evolving.

Coinbase’s L.J. Brock said “nearly the entire company will shut down” for four separate weeks to allow workers to recuperate.

University of Utah engineers have built a robotic exoskeleton that gives people with prosthetic legs a power boost that makes walking less difficult.

“It’s equivalent to taking off a 26-pound backpack [while walking],” lead researcher Tommaso Lenzi said in a press release. “That is a really big improvement.”

Continue reading “Robotic exoskeleton gives prosthetic legs a power boost” »

We’ve known about gravity since Newton’s apocryphal encounter with the apple, but we’re still struggling to make sense of it. While the other three forces of nature are all due to the activity of quantum fields, our best theory of gravity describes it as bent space-time. For decades, physicists have tried to use quantum field theories to describe gravity, but those efforts are incomplete at best.

One of the most promising of those efforts treats gravity as something like a hologram — a three-dimensional effect that pops out of a flat, two-dimensional surface. Currently, the only concrete example of such a theory is the AdS/CFT correspondence, in which a particular type of quantum field theory, called a conformal field theory (CFT), gives rise to gravity in so-called anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. In the bizarre curves of AdS space, a finite boundary can encapsulate an infinite world. Juan Maldacena, the theory’s discoverer, has called it a “universe in a bottle.”

But our universe isn’t a bottle. Our universe is (largely) flat. Any bottle that would contain our flat universe would have to be infinitely far away in space and time. Physicists call this cosmic capsule the “celestial sphere.”