Lifeboat Foundation

India is entering the space industry.

India is opening doors for private companies to enter space.
PM Narendra Modi launched the Indian Space Association that will serve as a “single-window” for matters of space technology.
What is India’s game plan to win the global space race?
Palki Sharma tells you.

Continue reading “Gravitas: India’s game plan to win the global space race” »

SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission to orbit was a success. Here’s what comes next.

Last week, SpaceflightNow reported that NASA’s upcoming crewed mission to the International Space Station would use a new Crew Dragon capsule. The mission, set for October 30 will feature a capsule named Endurance by the four-person crew. The news means that the crew won’t have to wait for SpaceX to refurbish one of its other two capsules.

That means the crew will take off less than two months after the Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian mission to orbit. On September 30 NASA announced that Crew-3 would launch no earlier than 2:43 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, October 30. It will be SpaceX’s fourth crewed mission for NASA and its fifth crewed mission overall.

Continue reading “SpaceX Crew-3 capsule name, launch date, and astronauts for next mission” »

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a gigantic comet — and they say it’s headed towards Earth.

The comet was discovered by University of Pennsylvania astronomers Pedro Bernadinelli and Gary Bernstein, according to The Daily Beast. The pair initially found evidence of a 60 to 100 mile wide comet seven years ago and have finally released a paper confirming it late last month in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dubbed the Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) comet, the astronomers also described it as the “nearly spherical cow of comets” in the paper.

BEIJING, Oct 11 (Reuters) — China’s military said on Monday it had carried out beach landing and assault drills in the province directly across the sea from Taiwan, though it did not link the exercises to current tensions with Taipei.

Democratically ruled Taiwan, claimed by China as its own territory, has complained of stepped-up military and political pressure from Beijing to force it to accept Chinese rule, including massed air force incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone. read more

The official People’s Liberation Army Daily newspaper, in a brief report on its Weibo microblogging account, said the drills had been carried out “in recent days” in the southern part of Fujian province.

Circa 2017

Call it worm power.

Continue reading “Biologist harnesses power of tiny worms in project that could reshape way cancer is screened and treated” »

Today, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Translator, its AI-powered text translation service, now supports more than 100 different languages and dialects. With the addition of 12 new languages including Georgian, Macedonian, Tibetan, and Uyghur, Microsoft claims that Translator can now make text and information in documents accessible to 5.66 billion people worldwide.

Its Translator isn’t the first to support more than 100 languages — Google Translate reached that milestone first in February 2016. (Amazon Translate only supports 71.) But Microsoft says that the new languages are underpinned by unique advances in AI and will be available in the Translator apps, Office, and Translator for Bing, as well as Azure Cognitive Services Translator and Azure Cognitive Services Speech.

“One hundred languages is a good milestone for us to achieve our ambition for everyone to be able to communicate regardless of the language they speak,” Microsoft Azure AI chief technology officer Xuedong Huang said in a statement. “We can leverage [commonalities between languages] and use that … to improve whole language famil[ies].”

In a paper published in Scientific Reports, academics at the University of Surrey have discovered that biological cells generate an electric field voltage that appears outside and not just within, meaning each cell acts as a tiny electrode. Since this voltage impacts how cells interact with their environment, including the way cells stick to one another, this has significant potential implications for future medical treatments.

Since the 1790s, scientists have known that electricity plays a role in the function of life, with the discovery in the 1940s that every cell contains a voltage that controls many of its functions. This is particularly the case in muscle and nerve cells but has also been shown to play an important role in diseases such as cancer.

However, until now, this voltage has always been understood to be contained within the cell. Through intricate experiments with red blood cells, the Surrey-led research team has shown that the voltage appears outside the cell as well. This means that cells effectively act as tiny transmitters, electrically changing the environment around them. Similar results in other types of biological cells could play a significant role in determining new types of medical treatment.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YYgG2a-_2po

We all know glass comes from sand but we don’t always get to see this process in action. In this video, we bring you footage of a solar-powered 3D printer that makes glass sculptures out of sand. Impressed? Just wait till you see the clips.

The 3D printer is called Solar Sinter and it was built by Markus Kayser. It works in the following way: after computer-drawn models are loaded into the machine, a large Fresnel lens beams sunlight onto a sandbox which leads to high temperatures of 2,552–2,912 F (1,400–1,600 C).

Continue reading “This Solar-Powered 3D Printer Turns Sand into Glass Sculptures” »

2021 is only halfway complete, and we cannot yet be said to have defeated the pandemic, but yet at the same time, the travel and tourism industry is said to be poised for a pretty rapid boom. In many ways and places, the recovery has already begun.

A live Globaldata poll showed that people are desperate to enjoy travels and trips again with a majority of them opting for longer trips than before. 26% of their respondents showed a desire to enjoy trips that spanned a minimum of 10 nights. As lockdowns and travel restrictions continue to be eased and countries continue to open up, we will likely see a surge in new tourists and travelers.

Jason Fong, a veteran of the industry, is the brain behind the Boss of Bali brand, a brand that has garnered over 2 million followers on Instagram. Fong shared his knowledge of all things tourism and how he has used his platform to promote the evolution of travel and tourism more sustainably.