Lifeboat Foundation

A future bike. 😃

This mountain bike’s suspension nails bumpy landings and enhances performance.

During a rocket launch, the sound energy produced by the engines is strong enough to seriously damage anything in close proximity.

Ever wondered how we get such smooth tracking shots of rockets moving at incredibly fast speeds?

Pioneering experiment could help design energy-efficient materials.

In a groundbreaking study published in Physical Review Research, a group of University of Chicago scientists announced they were able to turn IBM’s largest quantum computer into a quantum material itself.

They programmed the computer such that it turned into a type of quantum material called an exciton condensate, which has only recently been shown to exist. Such condensates have been identified for their potential in future technology, because they can conduct energy with almost zero loss.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mSXH_3hnr6M

On March 212021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover send images of Mars Helicopter Ingenuity deployment started from Debris Shield Dropping. For the first flight, the helicopter will take off a few feet from the ground, hover in the air for about 20 to 30 seconds, and land. That will be a major milestone: the very first powered flight in the extremely thin atmosphere of Mars. After that, the team will attempt additional experimental flights of incrementally farther distance and greater altitude. After the helicopter completes its technology demonstration, Perseverance will continue its scientific mission. Ingenuity hitched a ride on the Perseverance rover’s belly, covered by a shield to protect it during the descent and landing. Once at a suitable spot on Mars, the shield covering beneath the rover will drop. Then, the team will release the helicopter in several steps to get it safely onto the surface.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Continue reading “Perseverance dropped Mars Helicopter Ingenuity’s debris shield and started deployment sequence” »

Bypassing the “unhackable”.

Crypto miners find a workaround to Nvidia’s anti-mining limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060.

Imagine not a white, but a green Arctic, with woody shrubs as far north as the Canadian coast of the Arctic Ocean. This is what the northernmost region of North America looked like about 125000 years ago, during the last interglacial period, finds new research from CU Boulder.

Researchers analyzed plant DNA more than 100000 years old retrieved from lake sediment in the Arctic (the oldest DNA in lake sediment analyzed in a publication to date) and found evidence of a shrub native to northern Canadian ecosystems 250 miles (400 km) farther north than its current range.

As the Arctic warms much faster than everywhere else on the planet in response to climate change, the findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may not only be a glimpse of the past but a snapshot of our potential future.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

The 21-digit solution to the decades-old problem suggests many more solutions exist.

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you’re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem.

In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The question that begets 42, at least in the novel, is frustratingly, hilariously unknown.