Lifeboat Foundation

A new conductor material and a new electrode material could pave the way for inexpensive batteries and therefore the large-scale storage of renewable energy.

The energy transition depends on technologies that allow the inexpensive temporary storage of electricity from renewable sources. A promising new candidate is aluminium batteries, which are made from cheap and abundant raw materials.

Scientists from ETH Zurich and Empa, led by Maksym Kovalenko, Professor of Functional Inorganic Materials, are among those involved in researching and developing batteries of this kind. The researchers have now identified two new materials that could bring about key advances in the development of aluminium batteries. The first is a corrosion-resistant material for the conductive parts of the battery; the second is a novel material for the battery’s positive pole that can be adapted to a wide range of technical requirements.

Continue reading “New materials for sustainable, low-cost batteries” »

Move over, deep learning. Neuromorphic computing—the next big thing in artificial intelligence—is on fire.

Just last week, two studies individually unveiled computer chips modeled after information processing in the human brain.

The first, published in Nature Materials, found a perfect solution to deal with unpredictability at synapses—the gap between two neurons that transmit and store information. The second, published in Science Advances, further amped up the system’s computational power, filling synapses with nanoclusters of supermagnetic material to bolster information encoding.

Continue reading “Brain-Like Chips Now Beat the Human Brain in Speed and Efficiency” »

But that’s not the only reason robots are big here. It also has a lot to do with an aging and declining population.

“Japan is a strange, exotic and quirky place” — but that’s not the only reason it’s on the leading edge of a robot revolution.

All good things must come to an end, and Juno— NASA’s $1-billion mission to study Jupiter like never before — is no exception. The probe launched from Earth in August 2011, reached Jupiter in July 2016, and is scheduled to make its last two of 14 high-speed flybys around the gas giant in May and July.

But that doesn’t mean Juno is finished beaming back astounding new photos of Jupiter. At least not yet but it will soon.

A Danish company is aiming to build smaller, safe nuclear reactors based on thorium and molten salt, after securing funding in its first pre-seed investment round.

Copenhagen-based Seaborg Technologies, which is developing thorium-based Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs), has received funding from an investment coalition led by Danish innovation incubator PreSeed Ventures.

The company hopes the funding will accelerate development of its CUBE (Compact Used fuel BurnEr) reactor concept.

Berlin 26th April 2018 – The first full scale model of the European Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft (MALE RPAS) was unveiled today during a ceremony held at the 2018 ILA Berlin Air Show, which opened its gates at Schönefeld airport.

The reveal ceremony, led by Dirk Hoke, Airbus Defence and Space Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Eric Trappier, Dassault Aviation Chairman and CEO and Lucio Valerio Cioffi, Leonardo’s Aircraft Division Managing Director, confirms the commitment of the four European States and Industrial partners to jointly develop a sovereign solution for European Defence and Security.

The unveiling of the full scale model and the reaffirmed commitment comes after a nearly two-year definition study launched in September 2016 by the four participating nations Germany, France, Italy and Spain and follows the Declaration of Intent to work together on a European MALE unmanned aerial system signed by the countries in May 2015.

Continue reading “Airbus, Dassault Aviation and Leonardo reaffirm their total commitment in the first fully European MALE programme” »

The people-moving potential of a Hyperloop rightly generates a lot of the buzz, after all we are talking about fizzing passengers through low-vacuum tubes at close to the speed of sound. But what about its capacity to moves goods with new levels of efficiency? Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One has just introduced a new service called Cargospeed that, if it gets up and running, is promised to deliver cargo with airline-like speeds at trucking-like costs.

As i said the other day on here. No money for science. Plenty of money for war war war. And, the knucklehead public is out zonked out to whatever mindless BS they screwing off with this minute.

In a move that shocked lunar scientists, NASA has cancelled the only robotic vehicle under development to explore the surface of the Moon, despite President Donald Trump’s vow to return people there.

Scientists working on the Resource Prospector (RP) mission, a robotic rover that had been in development for about a decade to explore a polar region of the Moon, expressed astonishment at the decision.

Continue reading “Scientists shocked as NASA cuts only moon rover” »

An investigational drug in clinical trials for rheumatoid arthritis also prevents a common, life-threatening side effect of stem cell transplants, new research shows.

Studying mice, the researchers found the drug prevented what’s known as graft-versus-host disease, a debilitating, sometimes lethal condition that develops when transplanted stem cells attack the body’s own organs or tissues.

About half of patients receiving donor stem cells develop graft-versus-host disease, which can linger for months or years after their transplants. In some cases, patients die not from their cancer but from the complication itself. Current treatments are not effective.