Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019

The European Space Agency (ESA) study is investigating how practical constructing a manned base on the moon only using 3D printing technology could be, given that it would rely primarily on lunar dirt for building materials.

“Terrestrial 3D printing technology has produced entire structures,” Laurent Pambaguian, who heads the project for ESA, said in a statement. “Our industrial team investigated if it could similarly be employed to build a lunar habitat.”

Circa 2016

“In 2050 there will be trillions of self-replicating robot factories on the asteroid belt,” he tells the audience at WIRED2016.

Continue reading “VIDEO: Trillions of self replicating robots will likely colonize the galaxy” »

Is a process in nuclear physics in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei as fission products, and usually some by-product particles. Hence, fission is a form of elemental transmutation. The by-products include free neutrons, photons usually in the form gamma rays, and other nuclear fragments such as beta particles and alpha particles. Fission of heavy elements is an exothermic reaction and can release substantial amounts of useful energy both as gamma rays and as kinetic energy of the fragments (heating the bulk material where fission takes place). Nuclear fission produces energy for nuclear power and to drive explosion of nuclear weapons.

Further improvements in nuclear propulsion system efficiency beyond nuclear-electric (NEP) are possible. The fission process accelerates the fission fragments to velocities between 3–5% of the speed of light, far faster than the 0.027% achieved by NEP, which uses a conventional nuclear reactor to convert the kinetic energy of the fission fragments into heat, the heat into electricity, and the electricity back into Xe ion kinetic energy with eficiencies much less than 40%. In the fission fragment reactor, the high-speed fragments are used directly as the rocket exhaust after charge neutralization. Therefore the fission fragment rocket can produce a specific impulse (Isp) greater than one million seconds.[CR][CR]Previous concepts suRered from impractical or inadequate methods to cool the fission fuel. In this work the heating problem is overcome by dividing the solid fuel into small dust particles and thereby increasing the surface to volume ratio of the fuel. The small size of the fuel particle allows adequate cooling to occur by the emission of thermal radiation.

A black panel of aluminium created by lasers can purify water containing human waste and heavy metals to drinkable standards, using just sunlight.

Liquid metal machine can also be made as tiny motors. In fact, the micro- or even nanomotors that could run in a liquid environment is very important for a variety of practices such as serving as pipeline robot, soft machine, drug delivery, microfluidics system, etc. However, fabrication of such tiny motors is generally rather time and cost consumptive and has been a tough issue due to the involvement of too many complicated procedures and tools. This lab had discovered a straightforward injectable way for spontaneously generating autonomously running soft motors in large quantity Yao et al (Injectable spontaneous generation of tremendous self-fuelled liquid metal droplet motors in a moment, 2015 [ 1 ]). It was demonstrated that injecting the GaIn alloy pre-fuelled with aluminum into electrolyte would automatically split in seconds into tremendous droplet motors swiftly running here and there. The driving force originated from the galvanic cell reaction among alloy, aluminum, and surrounding electrolyte, which offers interior electricity and hydrogen gas as motion power. This finding opens the possibility to develop injectable tiny-robots, droplet machines, or microfluidic elements. It also raised important scientific issues regarding characterizing the complicated fluid mechanics stimulated by the quick running of the soft metal droplet and the gases it generated during the traveling. Our lab Yuan et al (Sci Bull 60:1203–1210, 2014 [ 2 ]) made further efforts to disclose that the self-powered liquid metal motors takes interiorly driven macroscopic Brownian motion behavior. Such tiny motors in millimeter-scale move randomly at a velocity magnitude of centimeters per second in aqueous alkaline solution, well resembling the classical Brownian motion. However, unlike the existing phenomena where the particle motions were caused by collisions from the surrounding molecules, the random liquid metal motions are internally enabled and self-powered, along with the colliding among neighboring motors, the substrate, and the surrounding electrolyte molecules. This chapter illustrates the typical behaviors of the self-powered tiny liquid metal motors.

Investment in U.S. offshore wind projects are set to hit $78 billion (€69 billion) this decade, in contrast with an estimated $82 billion for U.S. offshore oil and gasoline projects, Wood Mackenzie data shows. This would be a remarkable feat only four years after the first offshore wind plant — the 30 megawatt (MW) Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island — started operating in U.S. waters.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), there are 28 US offshore wind projects in the planning stage, with the biggest clusters along the East Coast, from Massachusetts to Virginia. There are also 15 active commercial leases for offshore wind development in the U.S. and if they are fully built, there is the potential to support approximately 25 GW of offshore wind capacity.

As Fifi the llama munches on grass on a pasture in Reading, her immune system has provided the template for a coronavirus treatment breakthrough.

Scientists from the UK’s Rosalind Franklin Institute have used Fifi’s specially evolved antibodies to make an immune-boosting therapy.

The resulting llama-based, Covid-specific “antibody cocktail” could enter clinical trials within months.

Japanese start-up SkyDrive is preparing to fly its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) test aircraft in public for the first time in August, as it sets its sights on building a thriving air taxi and urban air mobility market in the country on the back the developmental battery-powered design.

SkyDrive says it began flight testing a proof of concept model at its test centre in Toyota in December 2019, and the aircraft” completed its technical verification phase” in March.