Lifeboat Foundation

Golden Horde introduces swarm tactics to guided munitions—but it also lets the weapons make real decisions.

UK biotech valued at $500m will use public offering to move 5 life-extension technologies into phase 2 trials.

Japanese researchers have created a smart face mask that has a built in speaker and can translate speech into 8 different languages.

We live in a world full of technology but it was a world without smart masks, until now!

A Japanese technology company Donut Robotics has taken the initiative to create the first smart face masks which connects to your phone. Of course, we couldn’t have battled coronavirus with a simple mask that still does the job of protecting us perfectly well. We as a race need to bring technology into everything and more so if it does an array of extremely important, life-saving things like using a speaker to amplify a person’s voice, covert a person’s speech into text and then translate it into eight different languages through a smartphone app.

No one wants to walk with a walker, but age has a way of making people compromise on their quality of life. The team behind Superflex, which spun out of SRI International in May, thinks there could be another way.

The company is building wearable robotic suits, plus other types of clothing, that can make it easier for soldiers to carry heavy loads or for elderly or disabled people to perform basic tasks. A current prototype is a soft suit that fits over most of the body. It delivers a jolt of supporting power to the legs, arms, or torso exactly when needed to reduce the burden of a load or correct for the body’s shortcomings.

A walker is a “very cost-effective” solution for people with limited mobility, but “it completely disempowers, removes dignity, removes freedom, and causes a whole host of other psychological problems,” SRI Ventures president Manish Kothari says. “Superflex’s goal is to remove all of those areas that cause psychological-type encumbrances and, ultimately, redignify the individual.”

A new spin on the magnetic compression of plasmas could improve materials science, nuclear fusion research, X-ray generation and laboratory astrophysics, research led by the University of Michigan suggests.

The study shows that a spring-shaped magnetic field reduces the amount of plasma that slips out between the magnetic field lines.

Known as the fourth state of matter, plasma is a gas so hot that electrons rip free of their atoms. Researchers use magnetic compression to study extreme plasma states in which the density is high enough for quantum mechanical effects to become important. Such states occur naturally inside stars and gas giant planets due to compression from gravity.

Circa 2017

This bubbly concept car protects more than the driver; its next-generation rubber exterior can save pedestrians, too.

Continue reading “The Shapeshifting Car Of The Future Has Airbags On The Outside” »

CHINA’S increasingly belligerent behaviour on the world stage poses a major challenge for NATO, with Taiwan a looming flashpoint, a new report has warned.

Cooling rubidium atoms and slowing them down makes them behave like a mirror that could one day be used to explore the quantum world.

Circa 2012

Big science meets applied engineering. CERN, renowned for smashing protons, culling antimatter and the like, has put its accelerating processes to use making and commercializing solar panels.