Lifeboat Foundation

Ultralight bosons are hypothetical particles whose mass is predicted to be less than a billionth the mass of an electron. They interact relatively little with their surroundings and have thus far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they exist, ultralight bosons such as axions would likely be a form of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up 85 percent of the matter in the universe.

Now, physicists at MIT’s LIGO Laboratory have searched for ultralight bosons using black holes—objects that are mind-bending orders of magnitude more massive than the particles themselves. According to the predictions of quantum theory, a black hole of a certain mass should pull in clouds of ultralight bosons, which in turn should collectively slow down a black hole’s spin. If the particles exist, then all black holes of a particular mass should have relatively low spins.

But the physicists have found that two previously detected black holes are spinning too fast to have been affected by any ultralight bosons. Because of their large spins, the black holes’ existence rules out the existence of ultralight bosons with masses between 1.3×10^-13 electronvolts and 2.7×10^-13 electronvolts—around a quintillionth the mass of an electron.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu9GyiloolU

The waterless toilet was developed by Cranfield University.
The toilet was developed for use in countries that doesn’t have running water.
This toilet doesn’t smell which is a result of multiple actions that go on beneath the toilet once the lid is closed.
–A set of gears within the toilet are turned when the lid is closed, these gears rotate the basin where the fecal delight was deposited.
–The waste falls into a holding chamber where a swipe blade wipes the inside of the holding basin.
–The solids drop down to the bottom, and the liquid floats to the top.
–An archimedes screw carries the waste upwards where it gets rolled into pellets that drop into a combustor and are burned.
–The combustor on the toilet will be on all the time but will require an initial source of power to get it going. The team had an initial idea of attaching a hand crank or a bicycle to generate the power needed but recently scrapped that idea. A solar panel could be installed above the toilet but that wouldn’t be very cost effective. The team has other ideas they are still working through to solve this issue.
–The poop ash that is accumulated from the combustor needs to be removed once a week.
–The liquid floats through a set of pipes that are above the combustor.
–The liquid is heated and passed through a set of 4 membrane bundles that purifies the water.
–This purified water drips down to the bottom where it travels to and is stored in the front step of the toilet.
–This water while purified isn’t clean enough to drink but it can be used in the garden to grow plants as well as for cleaning.
–This waterless toilet needs to be serviced every 3 months, the 4 membranes need to be replaced to continue to purify the water.
–So now you have the full overview of this toilet what problems do you guys foresee with this invention?
–The only thing I’m going to say is that I’m sure the swipe blade will wipe most of the poop out of the holding basin, you know there’s gonna be some nasty skip marks in there.
In reality though places in the world where people have real struggles in life, a skip mark isn’t one of them.

Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGPpXF7y9Rg.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0196890416306628

Continue reading “Bill Gates Backs the Waterless Toilet” »

Circa 2020

Everyone should be well aware at this point that you need to have a face mask and good hand sanitizer on you every single time you go out. It’s the only way to protect yourself and those around you from the novel coronavirus. The CDC says so, the WHO says so, doctors say so, and experts all over the world agree. In fact, the CDC tells people right on its coronavirus site to always wear face masks anytime they have to leave their homes for any reason. It really couldn’t be any clearer: “Cover your mouth and nose with a cloth face cover when around others.”

Extremely precise measurements are possible using atom interferometers that employ the wave character of atoms for this purpose. They can thus be used, for example, to measure the gravitational field of the Earth or to detect gravitational waves. A team of scientists from Germany has now managed to successfully perform atom interferometry in space for the first time—on board a sounding rocket. “We have established the technological basis for atom interferometry on board of a sounding rocket and demonstrated that such experiments are not only possible on Earth, but also in space,” said Professor Patrick Windpassinger of the Institute of Physics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), whose team was involved in the investigation. The results of their analyses have been published in Nature Communications.

A team of researchers from various universities and research centers led by Leibniz University Hannover launched the MAIUS-1 mission in January 2017. This has since become the first rocket mission on which a Bose-Einstein condensate has been generated in space. This special state of matter occurs when atoms—in this case atoms of rubidium—are cooled to a temperature close to absolute zero, or minus 273 degrees Celsius. “For us, this ultracold ensemble represented a very promising starting point for atom interferometry,” explained Windpassinger. Temperature is one of the determining factors, because measurements can be carried out more accurately and for longer periods at lower temperatures.

Now THAT mechanism could be a game changer for functional, fully reversible cryonic suspension…

Indian jumping ants can shrink their brains by 20 per cent and then expand them back again to allow energy to be temporarily diverted towards egg production, according to a new study.

The inch-long arthropods were already known to be able to catch and kill prey twice their size, jump four inches in the air and compete in 40-day royal rumble death matches to decide the next queen of the colony.

Continue reading “Meet the insect that can shrink its brain — and then grow it back again” »

A serendipitous discovery by citizen scientists has provided a unique new window into the diverse environments that produce stars and star clusters, revealing the presence of “stellar nurseries” before infant stars emerge from their birth clouds, according to Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Grace Wolf-Chase.

“Yellowballs are small compact features that were identified in infrared images acquired by the Spitzer Space Telescope during online discussions on the Milky Way Project, an initiative on the online citizen science platform zooniverse.org, that asked citizen scientists to help identify features associated with young, massive stars greater than 10 solar masses,” said Wolf-Chase, lead author of “The Milky Way Project: Probing Star Formation with First Results on Yellowballs from DR2,” which appears in the Astrophysical Journal. “Early research suggested yellowballs are produced by young stars as they heat the surrounding gas and dust from which they were born.”

The yellowballs discovered by citizen scientists shed infrared light on a very early stage in the development of star clusters, when they are a ‘mere’ hundred thousand years old. “This is the point at which their presence is first revealed, but they remain embedded in their dusty birth cocoons,” Wolf-Chase said. “This allows us to link the properties of stars with their birth environments, as if a human were giving birth to a hundred or so infants at once.”

In 2003, Lyon was just finishing school and working as a hired hacker. Companies tasked him with rooting out vulnerabilities in their systems, and he’d developed mapping tools for the job. His electronic sniffers would trace a network’s lines and nodes and report back what they found. Why not set them loose on the mother of all networks, he thought? So he did.

The resulting visualization recalled grand natural patterns, like networks of neurons or the large-scale structure of the universe. But it was at once more mundane and mind-boggling—representing, as it did, both a collection of mostly standard laptop and desktop computers connected to servers in run-of-the-mill office parks and an emerging technological force that was far more than the sum of it parts.

Continue reading “This Wild Video Maps the Entire Internet and Its Evolution Since 1997” »

Going forward, Northrop Grumman projects that starting in 2025 they will begin refueling satellites in orbit and removing orbital debris from nearby “high value” satellites, Anderson said.

Satellites could live longer lives thanks to new technology being tested by Northrop Grumman.

On Monday (April 12), Northrop Grumman Corporation and SpaceLogistics LLC (a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) announced that their satellite servicing spacecraft, called Mission Extension Vehicle 2 (MEV-2), successfully docked to the commercial communications satellite Intelsat 10–02 (IS-10–02).

Take my micro-transaction.

We may be on track to our own version of the Oasis after an announcement yesterday from Epic Games that it has raised $1 billion to put towards building “the metaverse.”

Epic Games has created multiple hugely popular video games, including Fortnite, Assassin’s Creed, and Godfall. An eye-popping demo released last May shows off Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, its next-gen computer program for making video games, interactive experiences, and augmented and virtual reality apps, set to be released later this year. The graphics are so advanced that the demo doesn’t look terribly different from a really high-quality video camera following someone around in real life—except it’s even cooler. In February Epic unveiled its MetaHuman Creator, an app that creates highly realistic “digital humans” in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Continue reading “Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse” »