Lifeboat Foundation

Soon, your phone can wirelessly charge from across the room.

JPL’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is finally ready for testing after two decades in the making.

Spin a merry-go-round fast enough and the riders fly off in all directions. But the spinning particles in a Rice University lab do just the opposite.

Experiments in the Rice lab of chemical engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal show micron-sized spheres coming together under the influence of a rapidly spinning magnetic field. That’s no surprise because the particles themselves are magnetized.

Continue reading “Fast-spinning spheres show nanoscale systems’ secrets” »

New research from the University of Southern California has shed light on how the decline of the brain’s vascular system precedes the build-up of the plaques and tau tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

A leaky blood-brain barrier sets the scene for dementia

Traditionally, many researchers have focused their efforts on the amyloid and tau proteins that accumulate in the brain and are typical of Alzheimer’s disease progression. However, the researchers in this new study suggest that the problem begins before this due to a leaking blood-brain barrier [1].

Continue reading “Failure of the Blood-Brain Barrier Proceeds Dementia” »

Ionity, the new ‘ultra-fast’ joint electric car charging network by BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Volkswagen, is slowly starting to take shape in Europe and now we get to see the map of their planned stations for the first time. This new network is believed by many to be the most important electric vehicle charging infrastructure effort since Tesla’s Supercharger network. They are planning 400 stations with a capacity of up to 350 kW across Europe by 2020. They started work on the first 20 stations last year and they plan to hit a total of 100 stations this year. Now we get to see what that netwo…

Deeper space.

Electrical and optical engineers in Australia have designed a novel platform that could tailor telecommunication and optical transmissions. They experimentally demonstrated their system using a new transmission wavelength with a higher bandwidth capacity than those currently used in wireless communication. Reported this week in APL Photonics, these experiments open up new horizons in communication and photonics technology. Here, a schematic of the problem: Aperture in a metallic screen with a dielectric fiber placed on top acting as a magnetic dipole emitter when excited by a wave incident…

Meet OceanOne, a robot avatar that lets humans explore deep under the Ocean’s surface, without any of the dangers or time limits associated with diving.

While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments.

OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet.

Continue reading “Humanoid Robot Can Dive Deep Underwater, Exploring Reefs And Shipwrecks” »