Lifeboat Foundation

The next time your have a drink at your favorite restaurant or bar; it could be in a levitating glass.

Diehard cocktail aficionados swear by serving specific drinks in the correct glass. I wonder what they’ll make of the Levitating CUP, a cocktail glass designed to float above a portable base, in seeming defiance of gravity.

It’s the brainchild of Joe Paglione, CEO of a Chicago-based startup company called Levitating Cup. They’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the necessary capital to bring the products to market. There are cocktail glasses, dessert cups, beer cups, plates, and even pillows for optimal presentation-just in case you want to throw a full dinner party without the usual coasters and place mats.

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The realization of reconfigurable modular microrobots could aid drug delivery and microsurgery by allowing a single system to navigate diverse environments and perform multiple tasks. So far, microrobotic systems are limited by insufficient versatility; for instance, helical shapes commonly used for magnetic swimmers cannot effectively assemble and disassemble into different size and shapes. Here by using microswimmers with simple geometries constructed of spherical particles, we show how magnetohydrodynamics can be used to assemble and disassemble modular microrobots with different physical characteristics. We develop a mechanistic physical model that we use to improve assembly strategies. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of dynamically changing the physical properties of microswimmers through assembly and disassembly in a controlled fluidic environment. Finally, we show that different configurations have different swimming properties by examining swimming speed dependence on configuration size.

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet.

A result from an experiment in Hungary catches the attention of a group of theorists in the United States.

NASA researchers suggest sea levels may be plunging around Greenland because of ice loss and a resulting decline in gravitational pull.

This anti-drone rifle can shoot down any drone.

“An increasing number of US landowners want to build commune-style villages that are completely self-sufficient and have a low carbon footprint”

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Gear & Gadgets —

Transistors will stop shrinking in 2021, but Moore’s law will live on.

Final semiconductor industry roadmap says the future is 3D packaging and cooling.

Binary black holes recently discovered by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration could be primordial entities that formed just after the Big Bang, report Japanese astrophysicists.

If further data support this observation, it could mark the first confirmed finding of a primordial black hole, guiding theories about the beginnings of the universe.

In February, the LIGO-Virgo collaboration announced the first successful detection of gravitational waves.

Continue reading “Did the LIGO gravitational waves originate from primordial black holes?” »