Lifeboat Foundation

At any given time, 1100 tons of microplastic are floating over the western US. New modeling shows the surprising sources of the nefarious pollutant.

If you find yourself in some secluded spot in the American West—maybe Yellowstone, or the deserts of Utah, or the forests of Oregon—take a deep breath and get some fresh air along with some microplastic. According to new modeling, 1100 tons of it is currently floating above the western US. The stuff is falling out of the sky, tainting the most remote corners of North America—and the world. As I’ve said before, plastic rain is the new acid rain.

But where is it all coming from? You’d think it’d be arising from nearby cities—western metropolises like Denver and Salt Lake City. But new modeling published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside of major cities. Another 11 percent could be blowing all the way in from the ocean. (The researchers who built the model reckon that microplastic particles stay airborne for nearly a week, and that’s more than enough time for them to cross continents and oceans.)

Continue reading “Plastic Is Falling From the Sky. But Where’s It Coming From?” »

I don’t see why he needed a NASA contract when he could easily pay for this himself, but whatever.

Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, was one of three companies to land the Pentagon contract for a rocket powered by a nuclear reactor.

How seriously do you take your diet?

It is one of the foundations upon which everything else stands.

Continue reading “Change Your Diet Change Your Life” »

This ball-shaped rotating wing rc-aircraft was designed and built to learn about the flight behavior of constantly horizontally rotating wings.

It flies with a remarkable stability in winds up to 1bft. Flightweight is around 650grs. and it is powerd by a 3D vector control unit, permanently stabilized by a 3S-1050mA LiPo (120 grs.) as a pendulum. The rotating ball is made from 6mm DEPRON and cf-rods.

Circa 2019

The “Forze VIII”, a hydrogen-electric Le Mans style prototype, became the first-ever hydrogen-electric vehicle to beat petrol-powered cars in an official race.

The car, that was designed, built, tested and raced by a group of students from Delft University of Technology, finished second in the Supercar Challenge at the TT Circuit in Assen, the Netherlands.

Continue reading “World’s First: Forze VIII Hydrogen-Electric Race Car Beats The Petrol-Powered Competition” »

Altman suggests taxing capital rather than labour. And, these taxes can be used to distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. Altman said his idea is nothing new but is more critical than ever as AI applications outclass their contemporaries. “If everyone owns a slice of American value creation, everyone will want America to do better,” wrote Altman.

“We should therefore focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens.”

Pinning careers and hopes to Moore’s law does sound like utopia, and even Altman admits it. He also believes that the AI revolution will compensate for the disruption by generating new jobs. Jobs, which we haven’t heard of yet (think: urban rodentologist). That’s why the OpenAI co-founder stresses establishing a system that will result in a society that is “less divisive” and enables everyone to participate in its gains. According to him, this technology revolution is an eventuality, and nothing can stop it. The revolution will be further accelerated as machines that make machines get smarter. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-3 was used to generate machine learning code, a million-dollar startup idea in itself. One application can put many developer jobs at risk.

Domino’s and Nuro teamed up for autonomous pizza delivery in Houston. Don’t get your hopes up, though, for a driverless drop-off: Many restrictions apply, and only a handful of hungry people can opt in right now.

Beginning this week, select customers who place a prepaid website order from the lone participating pizza shop in Woodland Heights can opt to have their food delivered by Nuro’s R2 robot. Those lucky patrons receive text alerts highlighting R2’s location, and can track the vehicle via GPS on the order confirmation page. Domino’s also provides a unique personal identification number required to open the bot’s door and reveal that piping hot pizza.

“We’re excited to continue innovating the delivery experience for Domino’s customers by testing autonomous delivery with Nuro in Houston,” Dennis Maloney, Domino’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer, said in a statement. “There is still so much for our brand to learn about the autonomous delivery space.”

It may be possible in the future to use information technology where electron spin is used to store, process and transfer information in quantum computers. It has long been the goal of scientists to be able to use spin-based quantum information technology at room temperature. A team of researchers from Sweden, Finland and Japan have now constructed a semiconductor component in which information can be efficiently exchanged between electron spin and light at room temperature and above. The new method is described in an article published in Nature Photonics.

It is well known that electrons have a negative charge; they also have another property called spin. This may prove instrumental in the advance of information technology. To put it simply, we can imagine the electron rotating around its own axis, similar to the way in which the Earth rotates around its own axis. Spintronics—a promising candidate for future information technology—uses this quantum property of electrons to store, process and transfer information. This brings important benefits, such as higher speed and lower energy consumption than traditional electronics.

Developments in spintronics in recent decades have been based on the use of metals, and these have been highly significant for the possibility of storing large amounts of data. There would, however, be several advantages in using spintronics based on semiconductors, in the same way that semiconductors form the backbone of today’s electronics and photonics.

A team of researchers at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology has developed a new technique for conducting real-time evanescent wave imaging using standard optical technology. In their paper published in the journal Nature Photonics, the group describes their new technology and ways they believe it can be used in photonic device characterization and other applications.

Evanescent waves are oscillating electric or magnetic fields that do not propagate—their energy remains in the vicinity of the source that created them due to a quickly decaying amplitude. They play an important role in acoustic and optical applications. Guided waves, on the other hand, have certain frequencies and energy that can travel very quickly along a designated path—they also leave a trace of their passing—an evanescent wave that decays so quickly that it is very difficult to see it with standard technology. Past attempts to image them have run into trouble, such as perturbation in the field under study, long acquisition times or the need for complex and expensive equipment. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a technique for measuring and imaging evanescent waves that overcomes all these problems.

The work involved studying evanescent waves of light by mixing them with a laser beam. Doing so resulted in the creation of a new frequency that could be both seen and studied. The method works, they note, because the laser changes the direction of the electric field. They found during experimentation that they could create different shapes using the laser. And further study showed that it was possible to both insert information into the evanescent waves and to take it out when desired. They also found that the shapes could be imaged using standard commercial cameras. The team calls the new technique nonlinear near-field optical microscopy and note that it does not require exotic equipment and can be done at very little cost.