Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2020

Harnessing the destructive potential of force and rotation, cutting tools like saws, drills, and angle grinders can obliterate the superlative properties that materials work so hard to perfect. And even when materials are designed to work against the power of these tools, the materials still often fail.

Continue reading “Bio-inspired ceramic–metal composite stands its ground against cutting tools” »

Circa 2014

(2014). Current-Activated, Pressure-Assisted Infiltration: A Novel, Versatile Route for Producing Interpenetrating Ceramic–Metal Composites. Materials Research Letters: Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 124–130.

Scientists have found a new “strange metal” that behaves in ways they can’t quite understand.

But the discovery could be key to finding out an explanation for a phenomenon that has troubles researchers for decades.

Most materials, such as copper and silver, behave in predictable and well understood ways, and scientists understand how their electrical conductance changes when they are heated or cooled.

Current night vision (NV) devices are bulky and heavy, resulting in a significant torque on the wearer’s neck. This torque greatly limits the wearer’s agility and often leads to chronic injury over prolonged use. Additionally, existing NV devices only provide a narrow field of view (FOV) and are limited to the near-infrared (IR) spectral bands, greatly limiting situational awareness in varied night conditions. ENVision seeks to leverage recent advances in planar optics and transduction materials to develop NV systems that don’t require bulky image intensifiers, provide wider FOV, offer enhanced visual access across IR bands, and are lightweight to reduce neck strain.

Five teams were chosen to develop multi-band, wide FOV planar optics and planar image intensifiers that impose near-zero neck torque on the wearer. Another five teams were selected to explore new methods to amplify photonic up-conversion processes from any IR band to visible light to enable future “intensifier-free” night vision systems.

For listing of the teams selected visit: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-01-12a

Kamose, the last king of the Theban Seventeenth Dynasty, refers to Apepi as a “Chieftain of Retjenu” in a stela that implies a Levantine background for this Hyksos king. A ‘normative inversion’ (cite Maimonides, John Spencer, Freud et al) turns the anti-Kemetic Hyksos monotheistic Set of Avaris into the equally sociopathic plague-maker of Exodus and Genesis. Two sides of the same monotheistic coin? Monotheism takes roots from the banning (and/or eradication) of all rival cults. https://core.ac.uk/reader/45268640

Egyptian accounts support Manetho and his implication that Moses is King Apophis or final Hyksos king Khamudi, “Josephus associated the Hyksos with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Many modern scholars believe the Hyksos may have partially inspired the Biblical account.” Geraty, L. T. (2015). “Exodus Dates and Theories”. In Thomas E. Levy; Thomas Schneider; William H.C. Propp (eds.). Israel’s Exodus in Transdisciplina ry Perspective: Text, Archaeology, Culture, and Geoscience. Springer. pp. 55–64. ISBN 978−3−319−04768−3.

“This is a great struggle between the truth and the delusion. This whole material world is in reality a prison for our souls, and its creator who is ignorantly revered as the supreme God by the Jews and Christians (and later also Muslims), is in fact a fallen angel, Ptahil, who listened to the whispering of the King of Darkness.”

Where did the material come from that created the Big Bang, and what happened in the first instance to create that material?

Technology is increasingly moving towards miniaturization and energy efficiency. This also applies to electronic chips. Light, and optics more broadly, are functional in making compact and portable chips. Researchers from the Photonic Systems Laboratory, headed by Professor Camille Brès, have successfully applied a novel principle for introducing second-order optical nonlinearity into silicon nitride chips. A first reported in the journal Nature Photonics.

Different colors of light

“When using a green laser pointer for example, the laser itself is not green because these are particularly difficult to manufacture. So we change the frequency of an existing laser. It emits at a frequency which is half that of green, then we double it by using nonlinearity in a crystal which gives us green. Our study consists of integrating this functionality but on chips that can be manufactured with standard techniques developed for electronics (CMOS). Thanks to this, we will be able to efficiently generate different colors of light on a chip,” explains Camille Brès. The demonstrated approach had never been implemented before. Current photonic chips compatible with CMOS processes use standard photonic materials, such as silicon, which do not possess second-order nonlinearity and therefore are not inherently capable of transforming light in this way. “This turns out to be a barrier to the advancement of technology,” adds the professor.

Formlabs, one of the few companies to turn 3D printing into a useful, real-world tool, is here at CES to show off two new printers. The Form 3+ and 3B+ are updates to the models it launched in 2019, with these units described as its “fastest 3D printers to date.”

New for 2022 include higher-intensity lasers, new material settings and faster, more durable hardware, with a promise of 40 percent faster prints. It also comes with the Build Platform 2, an updated deck for manufacturing that makes it easier to remove prints when they’re done.

At the same time, the company is showing off ESD Resin, enabling you to build components that dissipate electrostatic discharges. This should, Formlabs hopes, open up new opportunities for prints that can be used inside the electronics industry and other high-tech operations.

Astronomers were first alerted to the star’s unusual activity 130 days before it went supernova. Bright radiation was detected in the summer of 2020 by the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Pan-STARRS telescope on Maui’s Haleakalā.

Then, in the fall of that year, the researchers witnessed a supernova in the same spot.

They observed it using the W.M. Keck Observatory’s Low Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on Maunakea, Hawai’i, and named the supernova 2020tlf. Their observations revealed that there was material around the star when it exploded — the bright gas that the star violently kicked away from itself over the summer.