Lifeboat Foundation

The Rail Bus, a pioneering mode of transportation originating in Zhuzhou, China, is a groundbreaking discovery. Introduced by the Chinese manufacturer CRRC, this self-driving vehicle, resembling a train but without tracks, completed its inaugural journey in 2017. The Rail Bus seeks to revolutionise traditional concepts of buses, trains, and trams. The design of the Rail Bus was presented to the public in June 2023, and remarkably, within a span of fewer than five months, CRRC initiated testing on October 30, 2017. Covering a 3-kilometer route with stops at four stations in Zhuzhou, this marked a significant milestone in transportation evolution.

Imagine printing a table leg or a chair frame in minutes using liquid metal. Researchers from MIT have developed a new additive manufacturing technique that can do just that.

Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure, ready to be used or further processed.

Embark on a greener maritime future with Crowley’s eWolf, the first all-electric tugboat in the US, setting sail to revolutionize sustainability on the seas.

For the first time in the company’s 40-year history, Liebherr have converted one of their R 9,400 excavators from a conventional diesel to an electric powertrain.

The re-powered mining machine was commissioned at Fortescue’s Christmas Creek mine site in Western Australia – but what’s more significant is that the conversion was done during the standard service life of the machine.

“The modular design of Liebherr equipment makes it possible to repower existing diesel excavators to new zero emission configurations, such as electric powertrains,” explains Oliver Weiss, Executive Vice President of R&D, Engineering, and Manufacturing for Liebherr Mining. “This means that the diesel equipment customers buy today is also future-proofed for many years to come. The fact that we can ease the transition from traditional to decarbonized mining fleets for our customers is one of the key strategies of the Liebherr Zero Emission Mining Program.”

Our understanding of the world relies greatly on our knowledge of its constituent materials and their interactions. Recent advances in materials science technologies have ratcheted up our ability to identify chemical substances and expanded possible applications.

Quantum gates require controlled interactions between different degrees of freedom. A tunable coupling has now been demonstrated between the phonon modes of a mechanical resonator designed for storing and manipulating quantum information.

The Little Helicopter That Could, also known as NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, has unfortunately ended its mission of exploring the surface of Mars after a historic 72 flights since its first flight in April 2021. The decision to end the mission came after teams discovered that at least one rotor blade was damaged enough to where it could no longer perform aerial duties. Despite this, Ingenuity remains standing upright and communicating with Earth continues, as well.

“The historic journey of Ingenuity, the first aircraft on another planet, has come to end,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. “That remarkable helicopter flew higher and farther than we ever imagined and helped NASA do what we do best – make the impossible, possible. Through missions like Ingenuity, NASA is paving the way for future flight in our solar system and smarter, safer human exploration to Mars and beyond.”

Launched onboard NASA’s Perseverance rover on July 30, 2020, and landing in Jezero Crater on Mars on February 18, 2021, Ingenuity became the first aircraft to perform a powered flight on another world on April 19, 2021. Ingenuity was originally built for a 30-day mission where it would conduct five experimental flights to demonstrate that powered flight could be achieved on another planetary body other than Earth. With a total of 72 flights under its belt, Ingenuity has far exceeded expectations in terms of its original goals and objectives. This includes a horizontal flight distance of 2,315 feet (705 meters), which was accomplished just last month on December 20, 2023.

Great science stands the test of time: After 10 years of its publication, this paper with is still listed as trending in.

@PNASNews webpage! +3.5M views & 1k citations.

Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions.

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A recent study published in the journal Npj Parkinson’s Disease investigated whether increased thinning rate in the parafoveal ganglion cell-inner plexiform layer (pfGCIPL) and peripapillary retinal nerve fiber layer (pRNFL) indicates the progression of the Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Study: Association of retinal neurodegeneration with the progression of cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease. Image Credit: BioFoto / Shutterstock

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