Lifeboat Foundation

Onboard, Arctic Owl is equipped with all the requisite gear for oceanic expeditions. She features a helideck and an 850-square-foot hangar to accommodate your choppers. She also sports garages port and starboard that can hold a U-Boat Worx NEMO submarine, plus other toys, tenders and equipment. These smaller vessels can be deployed via her two cranes at the aft.

The spacious vessel can sleep up to 10 guests across six staterooms, including two master cabins with panoramic views. There is also space for six crew. Elsewhere, Arctic Owl features a large swimming pool and lounge at the bow, along with a spa on the flybridge.

Needless to say, Arctic Owl can certainly soar. She’s powered by twin Cummins hybrid diesel-electric engines that propel her to a top speed of 18 knots and a cruising speed of 16 knots. She also offers an impressive transatlantic range of 6000 nautical miles—that’s New York to the North Pole and back.

These more efficient and durable power tools are invading the DIY market. So how do they work?

Lately there has been a lot of talk in the power tool world about brushless motors. While the technology isn’t new to tools, it has recently gained traction due to some high-profile releases by Makita, Milwaukee, DeWalt, and others.

“Brushless motors have been around since the 1960s, being used in industrial and manufacturing applications for [motors that drive] conveyor belts,” says Christian Coulis, cordless product manager for Milwaukee Tools. However, Makita was the first company to use them in power tools. “[It was] first in our assembly division in 2003 for the defense and aerospace industries,” says Wayne Hart, Makita’s communications manager, “and then again in 2009 when we released a brushless three-speed impact driver.”

Continue reading “What’s So Great About Brushless Motors?” »

Rare gamma ray bursts are helping astronomers decode the mysteries of magnetars.

Injection molded glass could revolutionize production of telecom equipment.

Rice University computer scientists have demonstrated artificial intelligence (AI) software that runs on commodity processors and trains deep neural networks 15 times faster than platforms based on graphics processors.

“The cost of training is the actual bottleneck in AI,” said Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “Companies are spending millions of dollars a week just to train and fine-tune their AI workloads.”

Shrivastava and collaborators from Rice and Intel will present research that addresses that bottleneck April 8 at the machine learning systems conference MLSys.

Automated matchmakers do what no human can.

Summary: A new blood test can distinguish the severity of a person’s depression and their risk for developing severe depression at a later point. The test can also determine if a person is at risk for developing bipolar disorder. Researchers say the blood test can also assist in tailoring individual options for therapeutic interventions.

Source: Indiana University.

Worldwide, 1 in 4 people will suffer from a depressive episode in their lifetime.

Slick, viral videos from Boston Dynamics are impressive but teaching a robot to walk by itself is a lot harder.

LIVERMORE (CBS SF) — It sounds like a scene from a Hollywood sci-fi thriller, but researchers from Lawrence Livermore National lab have joined with an Air Force team of technologists to test if a nuclear blast could be used to deflect an earth-threatening asteroid.

Whether it be Bruce Willis and his crew of oil drillers taking on an asteroid as it approaches earth in ‘Armageddon’ or Tia Leoni and her father awaiting a massive tidal wave from an asteroid strike in ‘Deep Impact,’ Hollywood has been fascinated by the threat from space.