Lifeboat Foundation

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is challenging a U.S. government contract with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to develop technology to land people on the moon again.

In a complaint filed Friday in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington, Blue Origin said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s evaluation process was “unlawful and improper.” The complaint was filed under seal but tandem documents seeking a protective order gave an indication of its contents.

NASA selected SpaceX’s human lander bid on April 16 leading Blue Origin and a bidding partner, Dynetics Inc., to file protests with the Government Accountability Office less than two weeks later alleging that the award process was flawed. The GAO denied that protest on July 30 saying that NASA’s SpaceX selection had been made properly. Blue Origin, which has offered to contribute more than $2 billion of work on the project at no cost to the government, had vowed to continue pursuing the matter.

SpaceX is gearing up to launch the Starship into orbit, the biggest test yet for the ship designed to send humans to Mars and beyond.

O,., o!!!!!! That is some real Ironman stuff.

Building on OpenAI’s Codex system, CodeVox turns spoken, natural language into lines of code.

Mazda is developing a hydrogen-burning rotary engine, according to a recent report. It could build a prototype by the middle of the 2020s.

Pet food uses some of the worst meat, and creating a market for it helps keep industrial agriculture afloat. So why should humans eat all the cultured meat?

Summary: Opioid use disorder affects genes associated with proinflammatory immune molecule encoding and genes associated with remodeling the extracellular matrix, suggesting the connection between neurons may be altered as a result of opioid use. Additionally, those with OUD have higher levels of microglia in the brain.

Source: Elsevier.

The epidemic of opioid abuse affects millions of people worldwide, but researchers know surprisingly little about the molecular changes caused by opioids in the human brain.

Despite strong support from the FAA, the airline industry, and aerospace companies, the U.S. Senate ceased funding the development of a supersonic airliner in 1971. Two years later, the FAA banned supersonic flight over land, a prohibition that remains to this day.

The Concorde went on to serve various destinations, including some in the United States, flying at supersonic speeds only over water. That continued until 2,003 when British Airways and Air France retired their fleets, together amounting to just 12 aircraft. (Fourteen production aircraft were manufactured, but one was scrapped in 1,994 and another crashed in 2000.)

While the Concorde successfully overcame the technical hurdles standing in the way of supersonic passenger service, it succumbed to economics: The cost of fuel and maintenance was especially high for these planes. A new generation of aeronautical engineers and entrepreneurs are, however, keen to once again take on the technical, environmental, and economic challenges.

Sylvia Todd, star of Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show, came up with the idea for the WaterColorBot because she wanted to create an art robot and enter it in the RoboGames competition. She approached us at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories about collaborating on the project, and we loved it.

Together we designed and built our first prototype in February, and had a nicely-working robot about a month later. As we realized that this project had a lot of appeal beyond just a one-off project, we started developing it into a kit. Sylvia exhibited her prototype at RoboGames (and won a Silver medal), and we also brought the WaterColorBot to Maker Faire, where thousands of people got to play with it.

Sylvia was also invited to the White House Science Fair in April, where she got to demonstrate the WaterColorBot for President Obama (pictures and media coverage here).

Circa 2016

EDavid stands for the Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Interactive Display.

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