Lifeboat Foundation

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Newfound genetic material may rev up methane cycling by soil microbes.

Bad news for coffee lovers. Global warming will limit our coffee consumption.

Global coffee prices are climbing and threatening to drive up costs at the breakfast table as the world’s biggest coffee producer, Brazil, faces one of its worst droughts in almost a century.

Prices for arabica coffee beans—the main variety produced in Brazil—hit their highest level since 2016 last month. New York-traded arabica futures have risen over 18% in the past three months to $1.51 a pound. London-traded robusta—a stronger-tasting variety favored in instant coffee—has risen over 30% in the past three months, to $1749 a metric ton, a two-year high.

Continue reading “Coffee Prices Soar After Bad Harvests and Insatiable Demand” »

A team of astronomers has released new observations of nearby galaxies that resemble colorful cosmic fireworks. The images, obtained with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), show different components of the galaxies in distinct colors, allowing astronomers to pinpoint the locations of young stars and the gas they warm up around them. By combining these new observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, the team is helping shed new light on what triggers gas to form stars.

Astronomers know that stars are born in clouds of gas, but what sets off star formation, and how galaxies as a whole play into it, remains a mystery. To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various nearby galaxies with powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the different galactic regions involved in stellar births.

Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have produced the most compelling evidence to date that they’ve found one. In a pair of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Quantum Materials Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe₂ for short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor—a material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other futuristic devices.

“Nature can be wicked,” says Johnpierre Paglione, a professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the papers. “There could be other reasons we’re seeing all this wacky stuff, but honestly, in my career, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

All superconductors carry electrical currents without any resistance. It’s kind of their thing. The wiring behind your walls can’t rival this feat, which is one of many reasons that large coils of superconducting wires and not normal copper wires have been used in MRI machines and other scientific equipment for decades.

100+ dissidents, politicians, journos targeted by Israeli espionage toolkit.

A dazzling new animation puts you aboard NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft during its epic flybys last month of Jupiter and the huge moon Ganymede.

On June 7, Juno zoomed within just 645 miles (1038 kilometers) of Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. It was the closest a probe had gotten to the icy, heavily cratered world since May 2000, when NASA’s Galileo spacecraft flew by at a distance of about 620 miles (1000 km).

“The American Contractor Show” has shared its review of the installation of a Tesla Solar Roof. The show is a series of episodes featuring contracting and this episode took a deep dive into the Tesla Solar Roof installation process. Davide Silverstein and American Home Contractors demonstrated just what it takes to install a Tesla Solar Roof. The episode includes a step-by-step look at the installation process.

David Silverstein from American Home Contractors takes the host of the American Contractors Show, John Dye, on a walk-through of a Tesla Solar Roof installation.

Ark I is a self-sustaining space colony built to ensure humanity could survive disasters that make Earth uninhabitable such as nanoweapon disasters or particle accelerator mishaps.