Lifeboat Foundation

Tyler Falk — Smart Planet

Elio Motors has designed a three-wheeled vehicle that gets 84 miles per gallon. And with an eight-gallon tank it can get more than 670 miles in one fill up. The car’s price tag: $6,800.

“We’re not just creating a new vehicle,” Elio said in a press release announcing that more than 10,000 people have already reserved the vehicle. “We’re creating an entirely new industry segment that appeals to people who want a low-cost, highly efficient mode of transportation, but still want to own a unique vehicle that will turn some heads. The Elio gives people the best of both worlds.”

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Kurweil AI
Circuits that can operate at frequencies up to 245 terahertz — tens of thousands times faster than today’s state-of-the-art microprocessors — have been designed and fabricated by researchers at National University of Singapore and Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR).

The new circuits can potentially be used to construct ultra-fast computers or single-molecule detectors in the future, and open up new possibilities in nanoelectronic devices. For example, by changing the molecules in the molecular electronic device, the frequency of the circuits can be altered over hundreds of terahertz.

The invention uses a new physical process called “quantum plasmonic tunneling.” Plasmons are collective, ultra-fast oscillations of electrons that can be manipulated by light at the nanoscale.

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Rebecca Morelle — BBC News

Researchers have found that pollutants are strengthening storms above the Pacific Ocean, which feeds into weather systems in other parts of the world.

The effect was most pronounced during the winter.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Lead author Yuan Wang, from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, said: “The effects are quite dramatic. The pollution results in thicker and taller clouds and heavier precipitation.”

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Jason Dorrier — Singularity Hub

German auto firm, EDAG, made a stir at this year’s Geneva Motor Show with a fully 3D printed auto body called Genesis. And why not? Its smooth grey curves and futuristic honeycomb ooze sex appeal. And did we mention 3D printed cars?

EDAG aids major carmakers in design and production, and they’re no stranger to the 11-day Geneva Motor Show, a mecca where over 600,000 car enthusiasts come to ogle the best cars of today and glimpse a few visions of tomorrow.

3D printing, of course, falls squarely into the second category. EDAG thinks additive manufacturing has the power to improve the entire carmaking process from design to production—and Genesis is meant to embody that potential.

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Amy Shira Teitel — Motherboard

One night in the spring of 1914, what appeared to be an impossibly large comet whizzed through the skies over Innsbruck, the capital city of Tyrol in western Austria. It terrified the locals; it was too big and too low in the sky to be something as innocent and ordinary as an actual comet or a planet. It turned out to be something equally innocuous, however alien: a rocket-powered model airplane. Nineteen-year-old high school student Max Valier had launched his model with a firecracker as its engine. It was the first in a series of rocket-powered vehicles he would test in his short lifetime, all in the hope of eventually seeing rockets carry men into space.

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TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE POINT BY TONY BUZAN AND THE AUTHOR OF THE WHITE SWAN (ANDRES AGOSTINI), LET US CREATE A DIALOGUE SIMULACRUM BY BART SIMPSON AND HOMER SIMPSON.

TO BETTER UNDERSTAND THE POINT BY BUZAN AND THE AUTHOR, LET US CREATE A DIALOGUE SIMULACRUM BY BART SIMPSON AND HOMER SIMPSON.

Continue reading “Bart Simpson And Homer Simpson On The White Swan!” »

John Brownlee — Fast Company

Designed by Zuta Labs and now on Kickstarter, the Mini Mobile Robotic Printer is one for the mobile age. It cleverly sheds the bulk of consumer printing by re-imagining what a printer actually is.

Printers, of course, are annoyingly big pieces of hardware that remain tethered to our desktops, a particular insult while other gadgets become ever more mobile. The prime factors of printer bloat are the giant reservoirs of ink and toner needed to power them. Add to that the requirement that a printer be at least as big as a ream of paper.

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Allen McDuffee — Wired

The U.S. Navy is tapping the power of the Force to wage war.

Its latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher. It uses a form of electromagnetic energy known as the Lorentz force to hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7. Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and the Navy plans to begin sea trials aboard a Joint High Speed Vessel Millinocket in 2016.

“The electromagnetic railgun represents an incredible new offensive capability for the U.S. Navy,” Rear Adm. Bryant Fuller, the Navy’s chief engineer, said in a statement. “This capability will allow us to effectively counter a wide range of threats at a relatively low cost, while keeping our ships and sailors safer by removing the need to carry as many high-explosive weapons.”

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Education Elucidated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Dr. Wernher von Braun through the White Swan Idea:

REFLECTING ON THE EDUCATION WE IMMEDIATELY NEED! NAPOLEON BONAPARTE ON EDUCATION (1769 – 1821) observed:

“…Education, strictly speaking, has several objectives: one needs to learn how to speak and write correctly, which is generally called grammar and belles letters. Each lyceum has provided for this object, and there is no well-educated man who has not learned his rhetoric .… After the need to speak and write correctly comes the ability to count and measure. The lyceums have provided this with classes in MATHEMATICS embracing arithmetical and MECHANICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THEIR DIFFERENT BRANCHES .… The elements of several other fields come next: chronology, geography, and the rudiments of history are also a part of the education of the lyceum .… A young man who leaves the lyceum at sixteen years of age thence knows not only the mechanics of his language and the classical authors, the divisions of discourse, the different figures of eloquence, the means of employing them either to calm or arouse passions, in short, everything that one learns in a course on belles letters. He also would know the principal epochs of history, the basic geographical divisions, and how to compute and measure. He has some general idea of the most striking natural phenomena and the principles of equilibrium and movement both with regard to solids and fluids .… Whether he desires to follow the career of the barrister, that of the sword, or ENGLISH, or letters; if he is destined to enter into the body of scholars, to be a geographer, engineer, or land surveyor — in all these cases he has received a general education necessary to become equipped to receive the remainder of instruction that his circumstances require, and it is at this moment, when he must make his choice of a profession, that the special studies present themselves …”. [113]

Continue reading “Education Elucidated by Napoleon Bonaparte and Dr. Wernher von Braun!” »