Lifeboat Foundation

A start-up based in Berkeley, California, polySpectra, is attempting to make better materials for 3D printing. Their inaugural material, COR Alpha, promises to be a stronger and more durable material for digital light processing (DLP) printing. If it’s a compelling fit for your project, you could win $25,000 worth of 3D printing services from polySpectra.

In an attempt to spur the development of 3D printed projects with COR Alpha, polySpectra is holding the Make It Real 3D Printing Challenge. The challenge calls for submissions of designs that could benefit from the new material. The winner will receive $25,000 worth of polySpectra’s 3D printing services in the form of mentoring, design consultation, functional prototyping, qualification, testing and fabrication. Applications are due September 28.

By Elias Marat

Researchers for the U.S. Army are hoping to formulate a new shape-shifting material that can heal itself on its own in hopes to achieve the kind of futuristic killing technology famously depicted in the 1991 science-fiction film, Terminator 2.

In fact, the film’s villain, the T-1000, directly provided the inspiration to one of the Army engineers working on a project to develop “soft robotic” drones and unmanned aircraft based on flexible, self-repairing and self-reconfiguring materials, reports Military.com.

A new feature on Google search and Maps will give users near-real-time information on wildfires in the US. Data from NOAA satellites allows Google to update wildfire boundaries on its maps hourly.

“Using microfluidics, computer modeling and other techniques, they found that about half of the cells age through a gradual decline in the stability of the nucleolus, a region of nuclear DNA where key components of protein-producing “factories” are synthesized,” a press release announcing the research explains. “In contrast, the other half age due to dysfunction of their mitochondria, the energy production units of cells.”

Researchers studying aging have discovered that cells tend to follow one of two aging pathways. The way each individual cell ages is determined early on, and scientists can predict how a cell will age based on early observations.

« The U.S. Air Force is at least researching what it might take to develop a nuclear-armed hypersonic boost-glide vehicle with a range equivalent to a traditional intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM. This vehicle could potentially go on top of the service’s future Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent ICBMs, which are now in development. Publicly, the hypersonic weapons programs now in progress across the U.S. military are all conventionally-armed.

Aviation Week was first to report on this potential nuclear hypersonic weapon effort on Aug. 18, 2020, based on information the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center had included in a request for information posted online six days earlier. That document, which was marked “For Official Use Only” and has since been taken offline, outlined seven potential upgrade tracks for an ICBM with a “modular open architecture.” «

Continue reading “Air Force Eyes Adding Nuclear-Armed Hypersonic Boost-Glide Vehicles To Its Future ICBMs” »

Soaring temperatures, intensified flood risks and heightened water stress will threaten 57 U.S. nuclear plants over the next 20 years, forcing operators to take additional resiliency measures, according to a new report.

“The consequences of climate change can affect every aspect of nuclear plant operations—from fuel handling and power and steam generation to maintenance, safety systems and waste processing,” said the analysis, which was published yesterday by Moody’s Investors Service.

If you eschew hyperbole and hang in for the long haul, maintaining a discipline of understatement in the midst of a flashy neon world, you may be offered a modicum of credence when you make an extraordinary announcement. No one is entitled to this courtesy twice. If the news that you trumpet to the moon does not pan out, your readers will be justified in discounting everything you say thereafter.

Here goes.

Continue reading “Age Reduction Breakthrough” »

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The specimen is so well preserved, entombed as it was in pure mud, that it is the best, most complete dinosaur fossil ever found — anywhere. We can even see what its last meal was!

Canada’s western provinces are famous for many things: dinosaur fossils, the Rocky Mountains, helicopter skiing in Banff, and one of the world’s best and most famous dinosaur museums, the Royal Tyrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta. One of the museum’s finest fossils belongs to a plant eating dinosaur called a “nodosaur,” a creature archaeologists say was almost 20 feet long and weighed in at close to 3,000 pounds when it lived 110 million years ago during the Early Cretaceous period.

A particularly unusual feature of this dinosaur was the way in which it expired; after eating a full dinner, it simply passed away while lying in a river bed, ultimately making its way out to sea. Perhaps a rain storm washed it away, or perhaps some other climactic event; no matter how it ended up there, the consequence was that the fossil survived in almost perfect form. It was discovered in 2011 by an oil sands worker in northern Alberta.

Continue reading “‘Mona Lisa’ of Dinosaur Fossils Found Unbelievably Well-Preserved” »