Lifeboat Foundation

The field of robotics is going through a renaissance thanks to advances in machine learning and sensor technology. Each generation of robot is engineered with greater mechanical complexity and smarter operating software than the last. But what if, instead of painstakingly designing and engineering a robot, you could just tear open a packet of primordial soup, toss it in the microwave on high for two minutes, and then grow your own ‘lifelike’ robot?

If you’re a Cornell research team, you’d grow a bunch and make them race.

The idea is to give craftspeople the tools they need to incorporate digital services to the items they’re already making. Poupyrev made it clear that he doesn’t want fundamentally change tried and tested items, like a jacket, into a computer first, and an article of clothing second. He wants to imbue everyday items with digital functionality.

In its final form, Poupyrev envisions clothing, furniture, and accessories that are all connected to the cloud, each providing their own, specialized functionality. Users will interact with screens using their sleeves and pause their music by tapping their glasses. Step trackers will live in our shoes, translators will live in our ears, and medicinal nano-robots could be injected into our blood streams. The very notion of a computer will radically change as little computers get placed into everything.

“This could allow makers to image and create a new world where things are connected and we don’t need keyboards, screens, or mice to interact with computers,” he said. “I’ve been working on this for 20 years and as it’s taken shape I’m realizing that we’re not building an interface. We’re building a a new kind of computer, an invisible computer.”

Continue reading “This Tic-Tac-Sized Computer Can Turn Almost Anything Into a Smart Device” »

It will then use facial recognition to double-check.

Older people can still grow new brain cells like young people, new study shows. Reference: http://

Older people can still grow new brain cells like young people, new study shows. Reference: surg.ws/2GYVXOU

Video by The Surg in association with Technology Networks.

Continue reading “Neurogenesis in older brains” »

The brains of decapitated pigs can be partially revived several hours after the animal has died, researchers have revealed, with some of the functions of cells booted back up when an oxygen-rich fluid is circulated through the organ.

The scientists stress that the brains do not show any signs of consciousness – for example, there was no sign that different parts of the brain were sending signals to each other – and that it does not change the definition of death.

But they say they have found a way to prevent brain cells from sustaining irreparable damage as blood stops circulating, and even to restore some of the cells’ functions.

Continue reading “Researchers ‘reboot’ pig brains hours after animals died” »

There’s something about the meandering streak of lightning that implies random chaos. Yet bolts from the blue not only hit the same places with regularity, but successive discharges often reuse the exact same channel.

It’s never been entirely clear how the path laid down by one bolt sticks around for repeat performances, but new research has discovered lingering pockets of charge in the wake of a single lightning strike, which could provide a map for more to follow.

Continue reading “Lightning Totally Does Strike Twice, And Now Scientists Know Why” »

SABRE could enable cheaper, more efficient flight, advocates say.

Now that they’ve identified the Higgs boson, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have set their sights on an even more elusive target.

All around us is dark matter and dark energy—the invisible stuff that binds the galaxy together, but which no one has been able to directly detect. “We know for sure there’s a dark world, and there’s more energy in it than there is in ours,” said LianTao Wang, a University of Chicago professor of physics who studies how to find signals in large particle accelerators like the LHC.

Wang, along with scientists from the University and UChicago-affiliated Fermilab, think they may be able to lead us to its tracks; in a paper published April 3 in Physical Review Letters, they laid out an innovative method for stalking dark matter in the LHC by exploiting a potential particle’s slightly slower speed.

Continue reading “Scientists invent way to trap mysterious ‘dark world’ particle at Large Hadron Collider” »

The Orca Helix moves up and down so that it is easy to get on and off when high, easy on the body when low.

Many things have changed in the last hundred years, but one thing that has hardly changed at all is the toilet. And as we have been saying on TreeHugger for what feels like a hundred years, it’s all wrong. Our bodies are designed to squat, yet instead, we sit on 14 inch high seats, which actually makes it hard to poop. As we get older, or fatter, people have trouble even getting on a 14 inch seat and buy “comfort height” toilets, which make it even harder to poop. It is exactly the wrong thing to do, causing constipation, haemorrhoids and worse.

Ivan pondering toilets / Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

Continue reading “This could be the biggest advance in toilet design in over a hundred years” »