Lifeboat Foundation

Make no small plans. That seems to be the logic among the leaders of Algeria.

For some perspective, I just wrote about the corporate behemoth Amazon, which hopes to get to 100% renewable electricity by 2025 (firm target of 2030) and has a whopping total of 31 utility-scale wind and solar power plants built or planned that add up to 2,900 MW of total power capacity. That’s 2.3 gigawatts (GW). Algeria is talking about building 4 gigawatts of solar power capacity in 5 years. That’s a pretty stunning target.

Continue reading “No Joke — Algeria Plans 4 Gigawatt, 5 Year Solar Power Initiative” »

Researchers at Toshiba Corporate R&D Center and Kioxia Corporation in Japan have recently carried out a study exploring the feasibility of using nonlinear ferroelectric tunnel junction (FTJ) memristors to perform low-power linear computations. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, could inform the development of hardware that can efficiently run artificial intelligence (AI) applications, such as artificial neural networks.

“We all know that AI is slowly becoming an important part of many business operations and consumers’ lives,” Radu Berdan, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “Our team’s long-term objective is to develop more efficient hardware in order to run these very data-intensive AI applications, especially neural networks. Using our expertise in novel memory development, we are targeting (among others) memristor-based in-memory computing, which can alleviate some of the efficiency constraints of traditional computing systems.”

Memristors are non-volatile electrical components used to enhance the memory of computer systems. These programmable resistors can be packed neatly into small but computationally powerful crossbar arrays that can be used to compute the core operations of artificial neural networks, acting as a memory and reducing their access to external data, thus ultimately enhancing their energy efficiency.

The existence of a planet the size of Earth around the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, has been confirmed by an international team of scientists including researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE). The results, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, reveal that the planet in question, Proxima b, has a mass of 1.17 Earth masses and is located in the habitable zone of its star, which it orbits in 11.2 days.

This breakthrough was possible thanks to radial velocity measurements of unprecedented precision using ESPRESSO, the Swiss-manufactured spectrograph, the most accurate currently in operation, which is installed on the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Proxima b was first detected four years ago by means of an older spectrograph, HARPS, also developed by the Geneva-based team, which measured a low disturbance in the star’s speed, suggesting the presence of a companion.

The ESPRESSO spectrograph has performed radial velocity measurements on the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from the sun, with an accuracy of 30 centimetres a second (cm/s), about three times more precision than that obtained with HARPS, the same type of instrument but from the previous generation.

Are you up for the challenge?

Venus is an EXTREME world, and we’re calling on YOU to help us explore it! NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is running a public challenge to develop an obstacle avoidance sensor for a possible future Venus rover: https://go.nasa.gov/36Cj5QE

🏆 1st place prize: $15,000.

Credit–https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA17936 NASA.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA is rolling out the International Space Station’s red carpet for Tom Cruise to make a movie in orbit.

The space agency’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said before Wednesday’s planned launch of two NASA astronauts aboard a SpaceX rocket that Elon Musk’s company is already getting customers eager to blast off.

Cruise is one of them.

So everybody likes to ride the roads, but no one likes to endure the roadwork. Sound familiar? We have all found ourselves shaking a fist or two at some construction workers, maybe even pointing our favorite finger at them to drive home the point of our frustration. If only there were a way to lay pavement in a quick, efficient manner? You know, something that had the style and panache of R2D2 that operated with the work ethic of your grandfather.

Well, check out this little wonder. Known as the Fastlane Paver, it is produced by Volvo and works quite well. Most paving machines will lay asphalt or concrete, then get smoothed out by a Caterpillar Steam roller or tamping machine to make the surface smooth and drivable. Not the case with the Fastlane though. It is an all in one paver. Capable of laying aggregate and pervious concrete, this machine can lay down a three meter wide strip at a distance of 18 lineal meters without stopping. Yep, you read that right. It does all of this in one pass, with no break.

Masks and testing are necessary to combat asymptomatic spread in aerosols and droplets.

Respiratory infections occur through the transmission of virus-containing droplets (5 to 10 μm) and aerosols (≤5 μm) exhaled from infected individuals during breathing, speaking, coughing, and sneezing. Traditional respiratory disease control measures are designed to reduce transmission by droplets produced in the sneezes and coughs of infected individuals. However, a large proportion of the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appears to be occurring through airborne transmission of aerosols produced by asymptomatic individuals during breathing and speaking (1–3). Aerosols can accumulate, remain infectious in indoor air for hours, and be easily inhaled deep into the lungs. For society to resume, measures designed to reduce aerosol transmission must be implemented, including universal masking and regular, widespread testing to identify and isolate infected asymptomatic individuals.

Humans produce respiratory droplets ranging from 0.1 to 1000 μm. A competition between droplet size, inertia, gravity, and evaporation determines how far emitted droplets and aerosols will travel in air (4, 5). Respiratory droplets will undergo gravitational settling faster than they evaporate, contaminating surfaces and leading to contact transmission. Smaller aerosols (≤5 μm) will evaporate faster than they can settle, are buoyant, and thus can be affected by air currents, which can transport them over longer distances. Thus, there are two major respiratory virus transmission pathways: contact (direct or indirect between people and with contaminated surfaces) and airborne inhalation.

There’s currently a race to create the first air taxi service using electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) and a new serious player has entered the race: Archer.

Following the rise of consumer drones and improved battery capacity, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL) with the capacity for passengers has become possible.

Continue reading “A new eVTOL player enters the race with 60-mile range electric air taxi” »