Lifeboat Foundation

Yusaku Maezawa, a key investor in SpaceX’s next-generation rocket system, called Starship, plans to sell a 30% stake in his online fashion-retail company, Zozo, to Yahoo Japan.

As part of the $3.7 billion tender offer, Maezawa will resign as CEO of Zozo, receive about $2.3 billion in cash, and maintain a 6% stake in the company he founded, according to Forbes.

Maezawa spoke about the deal during an emotional two-hour-long press conference on Thursday. Although he raised misgivings about how he managed the company in recent years, saying he regretted mistakes that hurt the company’s bottom line, Forbes reported that he rationalized his departure in another and far more personal way: a need to prepare for his 2023 flight around the moon inside Starship.

Scientists have known for decades that the universe is expanding, but research in the past few years has shaken up calculations on the speed of growth — raising tricky questions about theories of the cosmos. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

This is the second in a series of in-depth articles examining China’s efforts to build a stronger domestic semiconductor industry amid rising trade tensions.

China has to strike a balance between the heavy investment that the industry requires and the returns that such spending may, or may not, yield.

The universe is assumed to be roughly 13.7 billion years old, but a stunning new study says it could be significantly younger than that — by a couple of billion years.

According to the study, researchers used new calculations that took different approaches to figure out just how old the universe really is.

“We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy,” the study’s lead author, Inh Jee, of the Max Planck Institute, told the Associated Press. The research has been published in Science.

The single-loop contribution of Higgs bosons to the radiation shift of the energy of an electron moving in a homogeneous permanent magnetic field is calculated. On the basis of this contribution, the appropriate contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron and the probability of magnetic-braking radiation of Higgs bosons by an electron are found. The dependence of the mentioned quantities on the electron energy and the external field intensity is investigated.

Detecting landmines can be a challenging and slow process. Detecting them from a moving vehicle would make the process more speedy, but at the expense of accuracy.

At the Optical Society’s (OSA) Laser Congress, held 29 September—3 October 2019 in Vienna, Austria, researchers from the University of Mississippi, U.S.A., will report a new laser-based sensor that effectively detects buried objects even while the detector is in motion. This new device offers a significant improvement over existing technologies, which cannot be operated on the go and lose accuracy in the presence of external sources of sound or vibration.

Laser Doppler vibrometers (LDVs) combined with vibration excited in the ground have shown promise for detecting landmines and other buried objects, but their sensitivity to environmental vibrations mean they must be operated from a special stable platform. The device, called a Laser Multi Beam Differential Interferometric Sensor (LAMBDIS), provides comparable detection capabilities but is far less sensitive to motion, allowing it to be used aboard a moving vehicle.

Cambridge engineers have developed a new augmented reality (AR) head mounted display (HMD) that delivers a realistic 3D viewing experience, without the commonly associated side effects of nausea or eyestrain.

The device has an enlarged eye-box that is scalable and an increased field of view of 36º that is designed for a comfortable viewing experience. It displays images on the retina using pixel beam scanning which ensures the image stays in focus regardless of the distance that the user is fixating on. Details are reported in the journal Research.

Developed by researchers at the Centre for Advanced Photonics and Electronics (CAPE) in collaboration with Huawei European Research Centre, in Munich, the HMD uses partially reflective beam splitters to form an additional “exit pupil” (a virtual opening through which light travels). This, together with narrow pixel beams that travel parallel to each other, and which do not disperse in other directions, produces a high quality image that remains unaffected by changes in eye focus.

New technological devices are prioritizing non-invasive tracking of vital signs, not only for fitness monitoring, but also for the prevention of common health problems such as heart failure, hypertension and stress-related complications, among others. Wearables based on optical detection mechanisms are proving an invaluable approach for reporting on our bodies inner workings and have experienced a large penetration into the consumer market in recent years. Current wearable technologies, based on non-flexible components, do not deliver the desired accuracy and can only monitor a limited number of vital signs. To tackle this problem, conformable non-invasive optical-based sensors that can measure a broader set of vital signs are at the top of the end-users’ wish list.

In a recent study published in Science Advances, ICFO researchers have demonstrated a new class of flexible and transparent wearable devices that are conformable to the skin and can provide continuous and accurate measurements of multiple human vital signs. These devices can measure heart rate, respiration rate and blood pulse oxygenation, as well as exposure to UV radiation from the sun. While the device measures the different parameters, the read-out is visualized and stored on a mobile phone interface connected to the wearable via Bluetooth. In addition, the device can operate battery-free since it is charged wirelessly through the phone.

“It was very important for us to demonstrate the wide range of potential applications for our advanced light sensing technology through the creation of various prototypes, including the flexible and transparent bracelet, the health patch integrated on a mobile phone and the UV monitoring patch for sun exposure. They have shown to be versatile and efficient due to these unique features,” reports Dr. Emre Ozan Polat, first author of this publication.