Lifeboat Foundation

They’ll catch lots of pests, and most aren’t at all aggressive or dangerous.

Let Captain Kirk get you excited about returning humans to the moon.

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It was what’s called a “prophetic patent”—one that isn’t real yet.

Researchers have pinpointed a previously unknown source of volcanoes in the extreme depths of Earth — in the transition zone between the upper and lower mantle.

Until now, we thought we had a handle on the ways in which volcanoes form, welling up from the molten regions in the upper mantle beneath our planet’s crust, but the new discovery takes things much farther down.

In the Bermuda islands, which sit atop an extinct volcanic seamount, geologists have found the first direct evidence that material from the transition zone, between 400 and 650 kilometres (250 and 400 miles) below Earth’s surface, can bubble up and be spewed out of volcanoes.

Continue reading “Geologists Just Discovered a Source of Volcanoes Deeper Than Ever Before” »

Augmented reality can change “how you turn your head, how well you do on tasks, and how you connect socially with other physical people in the room…”

The National Academy of Sciences is always an impressive place, with visitors greeted out front by a more-then-life-sized bronze statue of Albert Einstein. In keeping with the spirit of the academy, Einstein is not depicted standing with his eyes looking upward to some fantastic future. Rather, he is seated, looking slightly downward in thought, holding papers on which his equations are written—doing the hard work of trying to make that fantastic future happen.

On April 9^th, the academy hosted an event, sponsored by the Kavli Foundation and produced by Scientific American, that honored 10 individuals who have also done the hard work of making the world better through their scientific research. The 10 were all winners of Nobel Prizes, Kavli Prizes or both. And for one hour, they took to the stage in the Fred Kavli Auditorium within the academy building to field questions by Scientific American Editor-In-Chief Mariette DiChristina. This video represents a few of the highlights of that panel discussion.

The new technology could be used for the development of effective and time-sensitive search-and-rescue robots.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V3GWrAJ9P-8

There are four colours to choose from.

A fleet of driverless cars working together to keep traffic moving smoothly can improve overall traffic flow by at least 35 percent, researchers have shown.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, programmed a small fleet of miniature robotic cars to drive on a multi-lane track and observed how the traffic flow changed when one of the cars stopped.

When the cars were not driving cooperatively, any cars behind the stopped car had to stop or slow down and wait for a gap in the traffic, as would typically happen on a real road. A queue quickly formed behind the stopped car and overall traffic flow was slowed.

Continue reading “Driverless cars working together can speed up traffic” »