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A new electric solar car project with a living extension and expandable solar panels is giving us a glimpse into what the future might hold for RV/van life.

Solar Team Eindhoven, a group of engineering students from the Technical University of Eindhoven (Netherlands), is probably the most famous team that has competed in the World Solar Challenge, a competition to create super-efficient solar cars.

The people behind Lightyear came up from that team, and now they are trying to use the knowledge acquired through the creation of the original Stella and Stella Lux solar cars to bring to market a road-legal solar car.

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Is there something special about consciousness? Can our inner subjective experience—the sight of purple, smell of cheese, sound of Bach—ever be explained in purely physical terms? Even in principle? Most scientists see consciousness as a science problem to solve. Some philosophers claim that consciousness can never be explained in terms of current science.

Free access to Closer to Truth’s library of 5,000 videos: http://bit.ly/376lkKN

Watch more interviews on consciousness: https://bit.ly/3Ce962v.

Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality (VR).

Continue reading “Jaron Lanier — Is Consciousness an Ultimate Fact?” | >

Theoretical physics video nominated for international award.

A West Vancouver student may have the keys to interstellar travel. He just needs a few votes and a whole lot of mass.

Holden Liu, 16 is a finalist in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, an international competition that aims to capture difficult scientific concepts or theories and present them in accessible videos.

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Summary: A new technique dubbed light beads microscopy allowed researchers to generate a vivid functional movie of the near-simultaneous activity of almost a million neurons in the mouse brain.

Source: Rockefeller University.

Capturing the intricacies of the brain’s activity demands resolution, scale, and speed—the ability to visualize millions of neurons with crystal clear resolution as they actively call out from distant corners of the cortex, within a fraction of a second of one another.

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Circa 2017

Livescience.com | By LIVESCIENCE

Sound has negative mass, and all around you it’s drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly.

That’s the conclusion of a paper submitted on July 23 to the preprint journal arXiv, and it shatters the conventional understanding that researchers have long had of sound waves: as massless ripples that zip through matter, giving molecules a shove but ultimately balancing any forward or upward motion with an equal and opposite downward motion. That’s a straightforward model that will explain the behavior of sound in most circumstances, but it’s not quite true, the new paper argues. [The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things]

Continue reading “Researchers Find Source of Strange ‘Negative’ Gravity” | >

Imagine a time where humans have set foot on most of the planets in the galaxy, with even more to explore. This exoskeleton spacesuit coincides with that ultimate dream and our unstoppable quest for space exploration!

Venturing beyond the realms of planet earth comes with its unique set of challenges. The effects of gravity being on top of the list. NASA has put a lot of time and effort into developing new-age spacesuits to counter the effects of gravity in hostile environments. 14 years to be exact, and it has cost them a whopping $420 million already. The space agency is expected to churn out another $625 million in time for the next moon mission which was earlier planned for the year 2024.

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Going to hear the SpaceX fans complaining about this but it actually makes perfect sense. SpaceX is already “deep into development” of the vehicle they plan on using for a lander therefore they don’t get as much money as a group that hasn’t started on development yet. Keep in mind that NASA is well aware that SpaceX is already using their money to develop Starship and SuperHeavy so there is no real need to ‘double-down’ on taxpayer development funding to a company that is already spending that money on that development.

One need look no further than the “race” between SpaceX and Boeing over Commercial Crew. Dragon had been in development since 2004 (and funded by NASA since 2006 or cargo and 2010 for crew) while Boeing only started development of Starliner in 2010. SpaceX took 4 years longer than planned for the Cargo version, (2006 scheduled but didn’t fly till 2010) and a full decade after that using the same basic design to fly crewed (2020) Boeing’s Starliner, even if it doesn’t fly this year is still ahead of SpaceX’s development.

It should be rather telling that SpaceX got the lowest award of all the contracts. Starship has always been the ‘outlier’ of the lander designs.

Both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will design moon landers that NASA can use to regularly send astronauts to the moon.

Continue reading “NASA awards SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 3 other companies 6 million in contracts to make moon lander designs” | >