Lifeboat Foundation

Why luxury brands like Hermès, Iris Van Herpen, and Stella McCartney are turning to mushrooms for an eco-alternative to leather.

The wondrous fungi-inspired creations in Dutch couture designer Iris Van Herpen’s Spring 2021 collection are like nothing else in the fashion world. Undulating crowns of brass coils top delicate micro-plissé gowns with bodices formed from sinuous silk tendrils. An early adopter of 3D printing and advocate for sustainability, van Herpen has emerged as a kind of oracle within the fashion industry. She spent lockdown in Amsterdam reading biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, which describes the hidden world of mycelium, the sprawling underground root-like networks of fungi (the visible part we know as mushrooms are akin to fruit on trees).

Terrain-relative navigation helped Perseverance land – and Ingenuity fly – autonomously on Mars. Now it’s time to test a similar system while exploring another frontier.

Latest GitLab survey finds one-year surge in automated aspects of DevOps. But is there a risk of over-automating?

We think of earthly life as evolving from the sea. But newly discovered microscopic “ball” fossils — found in ancient lake sediments in Scotland — suggest that evolution from single-celled to multicellular organisms might have occurred in lakes.

Pack your bathing costume — our solar neighborhood is much wetter than you think.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot ignore the warning signs for future catastrophes.

NASA Goddard

The most striking aspect of the approach—for our money, anyway—is the way Bennu feels like a small world; rather than just a 1600-foot-wide hunk of rock. There’s plenty of space on Bennu’s surface to jump around. And one could even leap off the surface, enter into orbit around the asteroid, and then touch back down. The space probe, in fact, captured rocks doing just that.

Got milk?

Hoping to capitalise on a surge in demand for home deliveries, a Singapore technology company has deployed a pair of robots to bring residents their groceries in one part of the city state.

Developed by OTSAW Digital and both named “Camello”, the robots’ services have been offered to 700 households in a one-year trial.

Continue reading “Run out of milk? Robots on call for Singapore home deliveries” »

A “four-legged fossil fish” predating dinosaurs has been recently rediscovered by groups hunting sharks with deep-sea nets.