Lifeboat Foundation

You may think that lithium-ion batteries are the best man can create, but researchers believe otherwise. There are other combinations of elements that are very promising. What about a cell with potential for seven times more energy density than Li-Ion could ever achieve? State of the art for current batteries would be 256 Wh/kg. Lithium-Carbon Dioxide batteries – or Li-CO₂, for short – can theoretically reach 1,876 Wh/kg. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago created the first usable Li-CO₂ battery. It was tested to up to 500 cycles, and it worked, which is great news.

Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago created the first usable Li-CO₂ battery. It has 7 times the energy density of a Li-Ion battery.

New interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog Aging Matters.

Interview with author and researcher Dr. Josh Mitteldorf who runs the aging research blog ‘Aging Matters’.

Dr. Josh Mitteldorf is an evolutionary biologist and a long-time contributor to the growing field of aging science. His work in this field has focused on theories of aging. He asks the basic question: why do we age and die?

Continue reading “Josh Mitteldorf — Cracking the Aging Code” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fCoU617GJG8

The potentially monumental 367-foot superyacht with state-of-the-art technology and design was presented as a 6.5-foot model at the Monaco Yacht Show.

Energy is a quantity that must always be positive—at least that’s what our intuition tells us. If every single particle is removed from a certain volume until there is nothing left that could possibly carry energy, then a limit has been reached. Or has it? Is it still possible to extract energy even from empty space?

Quantum physics has shown time and again that it contradicts our intuition, which is also true in this case. Under certain conditions, negative energies are allowed, at least in a certain range of space and time. An international research team at the TU Vienna, the Université libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and the IIT Kanpur (India) have now investigated the extent to which negative energy is possible. It turns out that no matter which quantum theories are considered, no matter what symmetries are assumed to hold in the universe, there are always certain limits to “borrowing” energy. Locally, the energy can be less than zero, but like money borrowed from a bank, this energy must be “paid back” in the end.

From raindrops rolling off the waxy surface of a waterlily leaf to the efficiency of desalination membranes, interactions between water molecules and water-repellent “hydrophobic” surfaces are all around us. The interplay becomes even more intriguing when a thin water layer becomes sandwiched between two hydrophobic surfaces, KAUST researchers have shown.

In the early 1980s, researchers first noted an unexpected effect when two hydrophobic surfaces were slowly brought together in water. “At some point, the two surfaces would suddenly jump into contact—like two magnets being brought together,” says Himanshu Mishra from KAUST’s Water Desalination and Reuse Center. Mishra’s lab investigates water at all length scales, from reducing water consumption in agriculture, to the properties of individual water molecules.

Researchers were unable to explain the phenomenon at the molecular level, so in 2016, Mishra organized a KAUST conference on the subject. “We brought together leaders in the field—experimentalists and theorists—leading to intense debates on the understanding of hydrophobic surface forces,” he says.

According to a decade-long study by an international team of researchers, human CO₂ emissions total 100 times more than the planet-warming effects of all volcanoes combined.

The total amount emitted by volcanoes is only about 0.3 gigatons a year — a tiny fraction of the 37 gigatons humankind produced in 2018 alone.

That means they’re not nearly as big of a contributor to global emissions as some prevailing theories hold.

After a year of working with the Federal Aviation Administration, United Parcel Service was awarded a certification that allows it to use drones on medical campuses.

After committing to having a first crewed launch of its rocket ship in 2019, Blue Origin, the rocket manufacturer and launch services company backed by Jeff Bezos, is likely going to have to push that timeline back to 2020.

Speaking onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco, Blue Origin chief executive Bob Smith said that the window for getting the crewed flight done within the 2019 time frame was narrowing. “We’re not going to be date-driven,” Smith said.

But as commercial launches come to market, customers can expect to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for a ticket on the New Shepard suborbital flight.

Cooperation means that one individual pays a cost for another to receive a benefit. Cooperation can be at variance with natural selection: Why should you help a competitor? Yet cooperation is abundant in nature and is an important component of evolutionary innovation. Cooperation can be seen as the master architect of evolution and as the third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and selection. I will present mathematical principles of cooperation.