Lifeboat Foundation

Once you graduate beyond development boards like the Arduino or Wemos D1, you’ll find yourself in the market for a dedicated programmer. In most cases, your needs can be met with a cheap USB to serial adapter that’s not much bigger than a flash drive. The only downside is that you’ve got to manually wire it up to your microcontroller of choice.

Unless you’re [Roey Benamotz], that is. He’s recently created the LEan Mean Programming mAchine (LEMPA), an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi that includes all the sockets, jumpers, and indicator LEDs you need to successfully flash a whole suite of popular MCUs. What’s more, he’s written a Python tool that handles all the nuances of getting the firmware written out.

Continue reading “Turning The Raspberry Pi Into A MCU Programmer” »

And it would be just one of many exoplanets found outside of our solar system that resemble the weird and wonderful planets of Star Wars.

Circa 2014 o,.o.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has announced the start of a five-year, $26 million effort to develop brain implants that can treat mental disease with deep-brain stimulation.

The hope is to implant electrodes in different regions of the brain along with a tiny chip placed between the brain and the skull. The chip would monitor electrical signals in the brain and send data wirelessly back to scientists in order to gain a better understanding of psychological diseases like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The implant would also be used to trigger electrical impulses in order to relieve symptoms.

Continue reading “DARPA teams begin work on tiny brain implant to treat PTSD” »

As Japanese scientists try to claim no Wakashio oil in Mauritian waters despite images, Mauritius sign a major trade deal with China amid growing frustration with Japan. What started as a shipping incident is fast turning into a major diplomatic crisis for Japan.

Yale chemists are pushing forward with innovative work to develop tomorrow’s liquid fuels from sunlight.

A quintet of Yale researchers — Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Nilay Hazari, Patrick Holland, James Mayer, and Hailiang Wang — are among the principal investigators (PI) for the U.S. Department of Energy’s $40 million Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energy to Liquid Fuels (CHASE).

CHASE, which involves six scientific institutions, will be based at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Yale’s portion of the funding is $6.27 million over five years, and will support dozens of graduate student and postdoctoral co-workers on Science Hill and in the Energy Sciences Institute at West Campus.

SpaceX just launched more satellites in a month than history has ever seen. But that’s bad news for astronomers.

SpaceX’s newest satellites sport sun visors — an effort to reduce their brightness in the night sky and their impact on astronomers’ telescopes.

“It will provide more convenient and cheaper transport for the peaceful use of space in the future.”

Experimental vessel lands safely after spending two days orbiting the planet.

Lysol Disinfectant Spray and Lysol Disinfectant Max Cover Mist meet the EPA’s criteria for use against the SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the ongoing pandemic, based on laboratory testing that found both products kill the virus two minutes after contact, the agency announced in a statement Monday.

While there are more than 420 products on the list of disinfectants that the EPA says are strong enough to ward off “harder-to-kill” viruses than the novel coronavirus, the two Lysol products are the first to have been tested directly against the virus and proved effective.

Meteorite material presumed to be devoid of water because it formed in the dry inner Solar System appears to have contained sufficient hydrogen to have delivered to Earth at least three times the mass of water in its oceans, a new study shows.

While the idea that enstatite chondrite (EC) meteorites contained enough hydrogen to provide water to the growing proto-Earth has been proposed, efforts to rigorously test this scenario have been hampered by difficulties in measuring hydrogen concentrations in ECs — an obstacle this study overcame.

According to models of Solar System formation, Earth should be dry. However, our blue planet’s vast oceans, humid atmosphere and well-hydrated geology boldly defy such predictions, making it unique among the other rocky planets of the inner Solar System.