Lifeboat Foundation

If there’s one major thing that’s holding back an electric revolution in the aviation world, it’s energy storage. But there are a ton of very clever people banging away at the problem of how to increase the energy density of batteries, and another growing faction working to make long-range, fast-fueling hydrogen-fuel-cell powertrains the standard for future flight.

Either way, it’s going to happen in the coming decades, and one new company out of Minneapolis is turning its attention to the other critical element of the propulsion system. H3X Technologies is bursting out of the gate with an integrated electric motor design it says can deliver the same sustained power as some of the best motors on the market at a third or less of the total weight.

Continue reading “H3X claims it’s tripled the power density of electric aircraft motors” »

It’s a bit like a Bond villain lair, only much more dangerous.

An underground missile base lurking somewhere beneath Iran looks an awful lot like a James Bond villain lair, complete with walls carved out of rock, spotlights, and a promise of “severe revenge.”

Continue reading “Iran’s New Underground Missile Base Looks Mildly Terrifying. See for Yourself” »

Interactive 3D images that appear to float in the air, above a table that a group of people can stand around without needing any special headsets or glasses: that’s what South Australian company Voxon Photonics has built with its US$10,000 VX1 table.

Fiction has promised us holograms for decades, with one of the most famous examples appearing in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope. On board the Millennium Falcon, R2D2 and Chewbacca play some sort of digital board game, interacting with figures built out of light hovering in the air above a table.

Such things have been a long time coming to the real world. VR and AR can both somewhat replicate the experience, but they require headsets. In the best case, these are a bit antisocial, stopping you from looking others in the eye. In the worst case, they completely remove the wearer from the real world to immerse them in virtual space.

(Inside Science) — Have you ever played with a pocket-sized laser, wondering how far its light would travel? Could you, a naughty student inside a classroom on Earth, annoy a poor substitute teacher on Mars by waggling your laser pointer at him?

“California curtailed between 150,000–300,000 MWh of excess renewable energy per month through the spring of 2020, yet saw its first rolling blackouts in August because the grid was short on energy,” says Paul Browning, CEO of Mitsubishi Power Americas (formerly known as MHPS). “Long-duration energy storage projects like ours that are designed to shift excess energy from periods of oversupply, like California in the spring, to periods of undersupply, like California in late summer, are critical to ensure similar events are avoided as we continue to make significant strides towards deep decarbonization.”

Storing fuel in salt caverns isn’t new, but hydrogen’s growing role in decarbonization has revitalized interest in the concept. The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has long stored emergency crude oil in underground salt caverns on the Gulf Coast, and notes they cost 10 times less than aboveground tanks and 20 times less than hard rock mines. The Reserve has 60 enormous caverns, typically 200 feet in diameter and 2,500 feet tall, and one “large enough for Chicago’s Willis Tower to fit inside with room to spare.”

Caverns can be created in salt domes by drilling into the salt dome and injecting the rock with water, which dissolves the salt. The resulting brine is extracted, leaving a large cavity. The next step is storing hydrogen in the cavern. Hydrogen electrolyzers can convert water into hydrogen by using renewable energy from solar and other sources. The hydrogen can then be stored, and reconverted to electricity when needed.

Burning iron as clean fuel.

Very interesting. I wonder if this method can become mainstream. 😃

Continue reading “World first: Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel” »

These guys are are able to grow patches of min-forest along roads and parks.

It’s a chance to get back to nature! 😃 I think it would be good to get in touch with nature after a hard day at work or after a long trip. 😃

At first glance, a pack of wolves has little to do with a vinaigrette. However, a team led by Ramin Golestanian, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, has developed a model that establishes a link between the movement of predators and prey and the segregation of vinegar and oil. They expanded a theoretical framework that until now was only valid for inanimate matter. In addition to predators and prey, other living systems such as enzymes or self-organizing cells can now be described.

Order is not always apparent at first glance. If you ran with a pack of wolves hunting deer, the movements would appear disordered. However, if the hunt is observed from a bird’s eye view and over a longer period of time, patterns become apparent in the movement of the animals. In physics, such behavior is considered orderly. But how does this order emerge? The Department of Living Matter Physics of Ramin Golestanian is dedicated to this question and investigates the physical rules that govern motion in living or active systems. Golestanian’s aim is to reveal universal characteristics of active, living matter. This includes not only larger organisms such as predators and prey but also bacteria, enzymes and motor proteins as well as artificial systems such as micro-robots. When we describe a group of such active systems over great distances and long periods of time, the specific details of the systems lose importance.