Lifeboat Foundation

Pretty cool.

Scientists report that amino acids, not sugar, supply most building blocks for cancerous tumor cells. Cancer cells are notorious for their ability to divide uncontrollably and generate hordes of new tumor cells. Most of the fuel consumed by these rapidly proliferating cells is glucose, a type of sugar.

Scientists had believed that most of the cell mass that makes up new cells, including cancer cells, comes from that glucose. However, MIT biologists have now found, to their surprise, that the largest source for new cell material is amino acids, which cells consume in much smaller quantities.

Continue reading “How cancer cells fuel their growth” »

New skin for keeping you under the radar.

Because the meta-skin is stretchable, it can be pulled tight to augment the range of radar frequencies trapped by the resonators.

The project set out to prove that that electromagnetic waves — “perhaps even the shorter wavelengths of visible light” — can be adequately suppressed with flexible, tunable liquid-metal technologies. The material is made up of rows of rings, with a radius of 0.1 inches (2.5mm) and gaps of 0.04 inches (1mm). They’re filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that remains liquid at room temperatures and is less toxic than metals who share this property, such as mercury. Each resonator acts like a small curved piece of liquid wire.

Continue reading “New ‘meta-skin’ to cloak objects from radars” »

New material improving stealth mode vehicles and planes.

When Surrey NanoSystems introduced the original Vantablack, the company said the carbon nanotube material is capable of absorbing 99.96 percent of light that touches it. It’s so dark, it can fool your eyes into seeing a smooth surface even when the nanotubes were actually grown on crumpled foil (seriously — watch the video below the fold). Well, the new version of Vantablack is darker than that. In fact, Surrey can’t even give us the percentage of light that gets absorbed, because its spectrometers can’t measure it.

In this video below (and the GIF above), you can see the material engulf the laser pointer in darkness when it moves across:

Continue reading “The darkest material on Earth has become even darker” »

A NASA material that’s 99% air lets this jacket maintain its temperature, even when it’s blasted with liquid nitrogen! Meet Oros.

This does make it easier for the whole concept of Singularity to exist.

Scientists prove we are tantalisingly close to creating the next generation of computer components made of organic living materials, as we move beyond Moore’s Law and into exotic new devices.

Continue reading “Could protein-powered ‘biocomputers’ be the future of IT?” »

The strangest life forms on Earth just got a lot stranger.

In 2003, Didier Raoult of Aix-Marseille University in France and his colleagues discovered a new kind of virus lurking inside single-celled protozoans.

Like other viruses, it couldn’t grow on its own, lacking the biochemical machinery to build proteins and genes. Instead, it had to infect host cells and use their material to produce new viruses.

Continue reading “These bizarre organisms could represent a new branch on the tree of life” »

Tweaking the structure of graphene so that it matches patterns found in the eyes of moths could one day give us “smart wallpaper,” among a host of other useful technologies.

Using a novel technique called “nano texturing,” scientists at the University of Surrey in England have successfully modified ultra-thin graphene sheets to create the most efficient light-absorbent material to date, which is capable of generating electricity from both captured light and waste heat. They described their work in a new paper in Science Advances.

Continue reading “Graphene Patterned After Moth Eyes Could Give Us ‘Smart Wallpaper’” »

What could be better than a material that’s super flexible, only one atom thick, and is 200 times stronger than steel? A material that’s equally strong and flexible, also only one atom thick, and inexpensive.

Scientists are asserting that this new discovery could potentially upstage the world’s greatest wonder material, graphene.

And, this will only be the beginning because with the lightering weight materials that have been develop we will see some amazing VR suits coming.

Virtual reality could one day incorporate all the senses, creating a rich and immersive experience, but existing virtual reality headsets only simulate things you can see and hear. But now, a group of engineers wants to help people “touch” virtual environments in a more natural way, and they built a wearable suit to do just that.

Designed by Lucian Copeland, Morgan Sinko and Jordan Brooks while they were students at the University of Rochester, in New York, the suit looks something like a bulletproof vest or light armor. Each section of the suit has a small motor in it, not unlike the one that makes a mobile phone vibrate to signal incoming messages. In addition, there are small accelerometers embedded in the suit’s arms.

Continue reading “New Virtual Reality Suit Lets You Reach Out & Touch ‘Environment’” »