Lifeboat Foundation

The company aims to raise NOK100 million by going public. It will use the funds to expand its overseas operation and reinforce engineering resources in Norway.

Norwegian floating PV specialist Ocean Sun is seeking a listing on the Merkur Market, a multilateral trading facility which has offered small and medium-sized companies access to the Oslo Stock Exchange since 2016.

The company aims to raise NOK100 million ($10.9 million) through the initial public offering. “The funding round is necessary in order for Ocean Sun to expand its operation abroad but also to reinforce local engineering resources in Norway,” Ocean Sun CEO Børge Bjørneklett told pv magazine. “We are involved in several demonstration projects but since they are relatively small we don’t make sufficient revenue yet and we need external financing to progress faster and stronger.”

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2016 gave us a fair number of false SETI detections. But lets imagine that this year it’s the year.

Maybe it’s first detected at a radio telescope in Russia, or perhaps an optical telescope in California. But in 2017, somewhere someone picks up a signal. Skeptical astronomers alert their colleagues, yet sure enough, they’re reading it out in telescopes around the world. It’s too specific or too weird to be a known natural phenomenon, and it repeats itself with suspiciously high fidelity over some interval. Cautiously, but excitedly, the news gets out. We’ve received a message from the stars.

It’s worth wondering: what would happen next?

Light is incredible. You can bend it, you can bounce it, and researchers have now found a way to trap light, physically move it, and then release it again.

This incredible feat of physics was demonstrated at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and published in Physics Review Letters. Researchers trapped light in a quantum memory, a cloud of ultra-cold rubidium atoms. The quantum memory was then moved 1.2 millimeters and the light was released with little impact on its properties.

“We stored the light by putting it in a suitcase so to speak, only that in our case the suitcase was made of a cloud of cold atoms. We moved this suitcase over a short distance and then took the light out again. This is very interesting not only for physics in general, but also for quantum communication because light is not very easy to ‘capture’, and if you want to transport it elsewhere in a controlled manner, it usually ends up being lost,” senior author Professor Patrick Windpassinger said in a statement.

Today, the Moon is about as inhospitable to life as it gets. The little water that’s there is trapped in ice or rock. It’s otherwise dry and airless, fluctuating in temperature by hundreds of degrees anywhere the sun shines. But long ago? That’s an entirely different story.

New research published in Astrobiology suggests that the Moon may have been shockingly habitable in the past during at least two periods — shortly after the Moon formed, and when volcanic activity was at its highest.

The key to it all is heat and lots of energy. The Moon formed after a collision between Earth and a proto-planet astronomers call Theia. And just after the smash up, there was lots of water vapor — enough that the Moon could’ve had a fairly substantial atmosphere and pools of water on the ground. Volcanic activity was also high, which could have replenished the atmosphere with water vapor from deep in the interior.

Are organic batteries coming?

Researchers at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, have for the first time demonstrated an organic battery. It is of a type known as a ‘redox flow battery,” with a large capacity that can be used to store energy from wind turbines and solar cells, and as a power bank for cars.

Redox flow batteries are stationary batteries in which the energy is located in the electrolyte, outside of the cell itself, as in a fuel cell. They are often marketed with the prefix ‘eco,” since they open the possibility of storing excess energy from, for example, the sun and wind. Further, it appears to be possible to recharge them an unlimited number of times. However, redox flow batteries often contain vanadium, a scarce and expensive metal. The electrolyte in which energy is stored in a redox flow battery can be water-based, which makes the battery safe to use, but results in a lower energy density.

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This ‘full-body controller’ lets you physically run, jump, and crouch in place 😲😍

Video of them testing their prototype lightsaber.

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Controlling brains with light.

Thanks to optogenetics, in just ten years we’ve been able to artificially incept memories in mice, decipher brain signals that lead to pain, untangle the neural code for addiction, reverse depression, restore rudimentary sight in blinded mice, and overwrite terrible memories with happy ones. Optogenetics is akin to a universal programming language for the brain.

But it’s got two serious downfalls: it requires gene therapy, and it needs brain surgery to implant optical fibers into the brain.

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Doug Robinson

‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: Dangerous rise of military AI…

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