Lifeboat Foundation

Google is working in secret at a spaceport in New Mexico to build and test solar-powered internet drones in a new initiative codenamed Project SkyBender, according to a report from The Guardian today. The company is reportedly renting 15,000 square feet of hangar space from Virgin Galactic — the commercial spaceflight outfit of business mogul Richard Branson — at the privately owned Spaceport America located near a town called Truth or Consequences. The lynchpin of Project SkyBender appears to be cutting-edge millimeter wave technology, which can transmit gigabits of data every second at speeds up to 40 times faster than modern 4G LTE.

Millimeter waves are thought to be the future of high-speed data transmission technology, and may form the backbone of 5G mobile networks. Aereo founder Chet Kanojia’s new startup Starry announced earlier this week it would use millimeter wave tech to bring gigabit internet speeds to people’s homes via Wi-Fi. Millimeter waves have much shorter range than current smartphone signals and are easily disrupted by weather conditions like rain, fog, and snow. Using what’s called a phased array, however, Google and others could potentially focus the transmissions over greater distances.

Google is currently testing the technique with a new solar-powered drone called Centaur and other units made by a division known as Google Titan, which the company formed after it acquired drone maker Titan Aerospace in 2014. The company has a deal with the FCC to continue testing until July, according to The Guardian. It’s also paying Virgin Galactic about $1,000 a day to use its hanger, as well as an additional $300,000 to Spaceport America to construct installations with servers, millimeter wave transceivers, and other tech onsite.

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Not mentioned is that the roads become easier to replace instead of having to repave them.

The minister told a conference of transport authorities last week that the tenders for the “Positive Energy” initiative had already been issued and the tests on the panels would begin in the spring.

According to France’s Agency of Environment and Energy Management, 4m of solarised road is enough to supply one household’s electricity needs, apart from heating, and one kilometre will light a settlement with 5,000 inhabitants.

Continue reading “France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels” »

According to Nick Pfitzner, the Tesla Powerwall is “a thing of beauty.”

Pfitzner, who lives in Sydney’s Hills District, was one of the first homeowners in Australia to have the highly anticipated energy storage battery installed at his home on Thursday.

Tesla announced in September it would be bringing the Powerwall to Australia, with a spokesperson telling Mashable Australia the country had been “prioritised as a market” due to its high number of solar energy users.

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Over the last 12,000 years or so, human civilization has noticeably reshaped the Earth’s surface. But changes on our own planet will likely pale in comparison when humans settle on other celestial bodies. While many of the changes on Earth over the centuries have been related to food production, by way of agriculture, changes on other worlds will result, not only from the need for on-site production of food, but also for all other consumables, including air.

As vital as synthetic biology will be to the early piloted missions to Mars and voyages of exploration, it will become indispensable to establish a long-term human presence off-Earth, namely colonization. That’s because we’ve evolved over billions of years to thrive specifically in the environments provides by our home planet.

Our physiology is well-suited to Earth’s gravity and its oxygen-rich atmosphere. We also depend on Earth’s magnetic field to shield us from intense space radiation in the form of charged particles. In comparison, Mars currently has no magnetic field to trap particle radiation and an atmosphere that is so thin that any shielding against other types of space radiation is negligible compared with the protection that Earth’s atmosphere affords. At the Martian surface, atmospheric pressure never gets above 7 millibars. That’s like Earth at an altitude of about 27,000 m (89,000 ft), which is almost the edge of space. And it’s not like the moon is a better option for us since it has no atmosphere at all.

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Tesla new competitor is in town, they are paying top dollar for Tesla’s talent. Guess Musk should have backed off SpaceX, because his money making has serious competition.

Tesla has lost a lot of talent to this company.

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Space is not a government program; it’s the rest of the Universe. Private space business is now a major factor, bent on finding investors interested in generating profits by making space more accessible to more people. Space business pays taxes to governments; it does not consume tax revenues. Further, space business can offer launch services to government agencies at highly competitive rates, thus saving taxpayer dollars. How can they do this, competing with government-funded boosters with a 50-year track record? Simple: governments have no incentive to cut costs. Traditional aerospace industry giants have a huge vested interest in boosters that were developed to military and NASA standards, among which economy was not even an issue. But innovative, competitive companies such as XCOR Aerospace and Mojave Aerospace, without such baggage (and overhead) can drive costs down dramatically. This is a proven principle: notice that we are no longer buying IBM PCs with 64 k of RAM for $5000 a unit.

Even more important in the long view, space is a literally astronomical reservoir of material and energy resources. The profit potential of even a single such resource, such as solar power collectors in space beaming microwave power to Earth, is in the trillions of dollars. What would it be worth to the world to reduce fossil fuel consumption by a factor of 20 or 100 while lowering energy costs? Can we afford to continue pretending that Earth is a closed system, doomed to eke out finite resources into a cold, dark future?

Can we afford space? Wrong question. Can businesses afford space? Yes. We get to reap the benefits of their innovative ideas and free competition without footing the bill.

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A new type of glass to reducing electric bills.

A revolutionary new type of smart window developed by the University College London (UCL) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) could cut window-cleaning costs in tall buildings while reducing heating bills and boosting worker productivity. Partially inspired by the reflective properties of moth eyes, this smart window is said to be self-cleaning, energy saving, and anti-glare.

When rain hits the outside of the smart window it forms spherical droplets that roll over the surface and pick up dirt, dust and other contaminants, then carries them away. This can either eliminate or reduce the need for manual cleaning.

Continue reading “Self-cleaning, anti-glare windows inspired by moth eyes” »

This cool machine turns waste paper into new paper within just 3 minutes.

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Yeah, he’s turned into quite the man-of-panic as of late.

Stephen Hawking is at it again, saying it’s a “near certainty” that a self-inflicted disaster will befall humanity within the next thousand years or so. It’s not the first time the world’s most famous physicist has raised the alarm on the apocalypse, and he’s starting to become a real downer. Here are some of the other times Hawking has said the end is nigh—and why he needs to start changing his message.

Speaking to the Radio Times recently ahead of his BBC Reith Lecture, Hawking said that ongoing developments in science and technology are poised to create “new ways things can go wrong.” The scientist pointed to nuclear war, global warming, and genetically-engineering viruses as some of the most serious culprits.

Continue reading “A Brief History of Stephen Hawking Being a Bummer” »