Lifeboat Foundation

“China’s Tiangong-1 space station re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and burnt up over the middle of the South Pacific on Monday, the Chinese space authority said.

The craft re-entered the atmosphere around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time (0015GMT) and the ”vast majority” of it had burnt up upon re-entry, the authority said in a brief statement on its website.

It had said shortly before that it was expected to re-enter off the Brazilian coast in the South Atlantic near the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Continue reading “China says its space station re-entered earth, broke up over South Pacific” »

Three years in, what I find most incredible about e-Residency is that it actually works.

Estonia’s quest to become a “digital nation”

To better understand how e-Residency came about, let’s go back almost 30 years, to 1991. Estonia had just won independence from the Soviet Union and was in the early stages of building a market-oriented economy from scratch. At the time, leaders were quick to identify the potential of the internet and open source collaboration tools (interestingly this was less out of principle, and more for the simple reason that they had no money to pay for Microsoft Office). They decided to become the world’s premier “digital nation.” A favorite quote I’ve heard in Estonia: “What do you think of when you hear the word Slovenia? Nothing. Precisely! We don’t want to be Slovenia.”

Continue reading “One of Estonia’s first ‘e-residents’ explains what it means to have digital citizenship” »

High-income Cape Town families have cut their average water use by 80%, according to Martine Visser, director of the Environmental Policy Research Unit at the University of Cape Town, while low-income families cut back by 40%. After city residents were restricted to just over 13 gallons per person a day, any household that blew the limit had a water restriction device attached to its pipes by authorities.

Wayward space station finally set to re-enter atmosphere, with debris landing anywhere between New Zealand and midwest US

Agence France-Presse and Reuters

Sun 1 Apr 2018 02.48 EDT Last modified on Sun 1 Apr 2018 03.11 EDT.

Continue reading “‘Splendid’ fireball: China’s Tiangong-1 space lab to hit Earth on Monday” »

A swarm of robotic bees, nimble enough to fly across the surface of Mars and explore the Red Planet’s nooks and crannies, is being funded by NASA.

The cyber-insects, dubbed Marsbees, are the size of bumblebees but have giant wings to generate sufficient lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than Earth’s.

Developed by US and Japanese scientists, the bees would be fitted with sensors and wireless communication devices so they could map terrain, take samples, or even look for signs of life, such as methane emissions.

Continue reading “Bees on Mars: NASA funds swarm of robotic insects for exploring Red Planet” »

We can’t wait to play around with this.

Everyone suffers from unconscious bias, but here’s an easy way to check yourself.

By Suzanne Lucas

Continue reading “Your Brain is Lying to You: Here’s How to Force it to Tell the Truth” »

CBS Local — Lockheed Martin has reportedly been working on a revolutionary new type of reactor that can power anything from cities to aircraft carriers.

The Maryland-based defense contractor recently received a patent for the compact fusion reactor (CFR) after filing plans for the device in 2014. According to reports, one generator would be as small as a shipping container but produce the energy to power 80,000 homes or one of the U.S. Navy’s Nimitz-class carriers.

Lockheed’s advanced projects division, Skunk Works, has reportedly been working on the futuristic power source since 2014 and claimed at the time that a CFR could be ready for production by 2019.

Continue reading “Lockheed Martin Receives Patent For ‘World Changing’ Fusion Reactor” »

The tech-industry is led by sci-fi nerds who want to create the things they read about, or saw on screen.

We all stand to benefit, provided that is, they can avoid the ethical pitfalls depicted in science fiction.

Continue reading “How does science fiction influence the real world?” »