Lifeboat Foundation

Meet the ambitious P-ONE proposal.

The P-ONE design currently involves seven 10-string clusters, with each string hosting 20 optical elements. That s a grand total of 1,400 photodetectors floating around an area of the Pacific several miles across, providing much more coverage than IceCube.

Once it’s up and running, you just need to wait. Even neutrinos will strike some ocean water and give off a little flash, and the detectors will trace it.

Continue reading “Astronomers propose building a neutrino telescope — out of the Pacific Ocean” »

D-Wave Systems is ramping up in the race to so-called quantum supremacy — the bid to become the first to successfully commercialize quantum computing.

Tesla, the little startup automaker that many guessed would be bankrupt years ago, sold almost 1 million cars in 2021. Meanwhile, established brands struggled.

Meta’s ambition for its metaverse just got higher with a new robotic eyeball that mimics the human eye.

What do you call a broken satellite?

Today, it’s a multimillion-dollar piece of dangerous space junk.

But a new collision-avoidance system developed by students at the University of Cincinnati is getting engineers closer to developing robots that can fix broken satellites or spacecraft in orbit.

“The time taken to optimize antibiotic therapy might mean the difference between life and death if an infection is serious,” says Adrian Egli. “A fast, accurate diagnosis is extremely important in those kinds of cases.” (Credit: Getty Images)

This could help treat serious infections more efficiently in the future.

Webb’s science goals cover a very broad range of themes, and will tackle many open questions in astronomy. They can be divided into four main areas:

Other worlds

Key questions: Where and how do planetary systems form and evolve?

Continue reading “Science With the Webb Space Telescope — What Questions Will It Answer?” »

Circa 2015 o.o!

If the holy grail of medieval alchemists was turning lead into gold, how much more magical would it be to draw gold from, well, poop? It turns out that a ton of sludge, the goo left behind when treating sewage, could contain several hundred dollars’ worth of metals—potentially enough to generate millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and other minerals each year for a city of a million people.

Metals have long been known to concentrate in sewage, which mixes toilet water with effluent from industrial manufacturing, storm runoff, and anything else flushed down the drain. It’s a headache for sewage utilities that must cope with toxic metals lacing wastewater headed for streams or sludge that might otherwise be spread on farm fields.

Continue reading “Sewage sludge could contain millions of dollars worth of gold” »

Circa 2021 o.o

In less than two years, you might be able to buy a smartwatch —powered with a radioactive diamond battery—that will outlive you and your progeny for generations.

The potentially game-changing battery comes from the San Francisco–based startup Nano Diamond Battery (NDB), which lauds its namesake “high-power diamond-based alpha, beta, and neutron voltaic battery” for its ability to give devices “life-long and green energy.” Imagine: Just one battery could power your insulin pump or pacemaker for your entire life (with loads of time to spare). Or it could provide the juice for a space rover, collecting Mars regolith samples for decades without any human assistance.

Continue reading “The Radioactive Diamond Battery That Will Run for 28,000 Years” »