Lifeboat Foundation

London to Sydney in 4 hours, anyone?

In 2013, Lockheed Martin announced development of the successor to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane.

The SR-71 was capable of reaching speeds over three times the speed of sound, and the SR-72 is intended to have even more impressive specs. Following is a transcript of the video.

“One of the biggest roadblocks to generating functional tissue replacements has been our inability to print the complex vasculature that can supply nutrients to densely populated tissues,” said Jordan Miller, assistant professor at Rice University in the US.

“Further, our organs actually contain independent vascular networks — like the airways and blood vessels of the lung or the bile ducts and blood vessels in the liver,” Miller said.

“These interpenetrating networks are physically and biochemically entangled, and the architecture itself is intimately related to tissue function. Ours is the first bioprinting technology that addresses the challenge of multi vascularisation in a direct and comprehensive way,” he said.

Continue reading “3D-printed vascular networks pave way for artificial organs” »

A cataclysmic collision between a pair of dead stars may have seeded our solar system with precious heavy metals including gold and uranium, according to a newly published study. If such an event were to be observed in the present day, it would be the brightest point in the night sky.

Watch Carhart-Harris further discuss the new Centre for Psychedelics Research in the video below.

BAE Systems has made aviation history by maneuvering the first aircraft in flight using supersonically blown air instead of ailerons or other control surfaces. Taking to the skies over Wales, the wing-shaped Magma UAV makes use of two new technologies that could revolutionize aircraft design.

Lightning strikes can more than double some mushroom crops, according to ongoing experiments that are jolting fungi with electricity.

Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said.

Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France.

“The situation is catastrophic,” said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at France’s National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies.

Continue reading “‘Catastrophe’ as France’s bird population collapses due to pesticides” »

Thankfully, it’s unlikely the solar array could be weaponized into an orbiting “death ray”.