Lifeboat Foundation

By Andrew Rosenblum

“When space traffic becomes routine, there’s going to be significant conflict between commercial air traffic and space traffic,” says Juan Alonso, a Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Right now, orbital launches are infrequent — about 70 per year around the world. So if there is, say, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch scheduled from Cape Canaveral, the FAA decrees the area to be a “special use airspace” and bars plane traffic from the area for hours to accommodate it.

But Alonso is thinking 5 to 7 years into the future. With space tourism carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR planning multiple suborbital flights per day, and orbital flyers like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Bigelow sending people and material into orbit, the skies will be getting crowded. The suborbital “up-and-down” space tourism flights offered by carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR may number anywhere from several hundred to multiple thousands a year – from zero today. Airline passengers will be less than thrilled to accept a lengthy delay so a rock star can sing in space or a billionaire can hang out in a “space hotel.” Also, airlines lose money from delays, or from re-routing around special-use airspace, requiring extra fuel burn.

Read more

Allen McDuffee

Spying could become much easier if a new lightweight, folding satellite concept gets off the ground.

Darpa, the military’s futuristic research agency, says it has plans to “break the glass ceiling” of space telescopes by shooting a new design into orbit that’s made of plastic and unfolds into a mammoth satellite that would dwarf the world’s most famous telescopes.

Continue reading “DARPA designs giant foldable satellite capable of surveiling 40% of Earth (VIDEO)” »

Valentina Palladino

At the Wearable Futures conference, London designer and researcher Shamees Aden debuted a running shoe concept that will put your worn out kicks to shame. The shoes, which he’s developing with University of Southern Denmark professor Martin Hanczyc, are 3D printed from a synthetic biological material that can repair itself overnight.

The running shoes are the product of Aden’s study of protocells. The basic protocell molecules are not themselves alive, but can be combined to create living organisms. Mixing different protocells creates different properties, and allows them to be programmed to behave differently depending on heat, light, and pressure. The shoes’ unique construction allows them to be 3D printed to the exact size of the user’s foot, so they would fit like a second skin. While running, the shoes would react to pressure and movement, providing extra cushioning when needed.

Continue reading “London designer creates 3D-printed, regenerative running shoes from protocells” »

Robert McMillan

Mike Caldwell spent years turning digital currency into physical coins. That may sound like a paradox. But it’s true. He takes bitcoins — the world’s most popular digital currency — and then he mints them here in the physical world. If you added up all the bitcoins Caldwell has minted on behalf his customers, they would be worth about $82 million.

Basically, these physical bitcoins are novelty items. But by moving the digital currency into the physical realm, he also prevents hackers from stealing the stuff via an online attack. Or at least he did. His run as the premiere bitcoin minter may be at an end. Caldwell has been put on notice by the feds.

Continue reading “U.S. Government Nastygram Shuts Down One-Man Bitcoin Mint” »

The Future of Skunkworks Management, Now! By Mr. Andres Agostini

This is an excerpt from the conclusion section of, “…The Future of Skunkworks Management, Now!…” that discusses some management theories and practices and strategies. To view the entire piece, just click the link at the end of this post:

Peter Drucker asserted, “…In a few hundred years, when the story of our [current] time is written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event those historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce [not so-called ‘social media’]. IT is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time ─ literally ─ substantial and growing numbers of people have choices. for the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it…”
Please see the full presentation at http://goo.gl/FnJOlg

11 December 2013 by Rowan Hooper

BIOENGINEERS dream of growing spare parts for our worn-out or diseased bodies. They have already succeeded with some tissues, but one has always eluded them: the brain. Now a team in Sweden has taken the first step towards this ultimate goal.

Growing artificial body parts in the lab starts with a scaffold. This acts as a template on which to grow cells from the patient’s body. This has been successfully used to grow lymph nodes, heart cells and voice boxes from a person’s stem cells. Bioengineers have even grown and transplanted an artificial kidney in a rat.

Growing nerve tissue in the lab is much more difficult, though. In the brain, new neural cells grow in a complex and specialised matrix of proteins. This matrix is so important that damaged nerve cells don’t regenerate without it. But its complexity is difficult to reproduce. To try to get round this problem, Paolo Macchiarini and Silvia Baiguera at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues combined a scaffold made from gelatin with a tiny amount of rat brain tissue that had already had its cells removed. This “decellularised” tissue, they hoped, would provide enough of the crucial biochemical cues to enable seeded cells to develop as they would in the brain.

Read more

by RHIANNON EDWARD

a TREATMENT to cure or halt dementia by 2025 is “within our grasp”, Prime Minister David Cameron said yesterday, as he announced a doubling in UK funding for research.

Mr Cameron was addressing scientists, politicians and campaigners from around the world who have gathered in London for a dementia summit called by the UK as part of its year-long chairmanship of the G8.

With the World Health Organisation (WHO) forecasting that the number of dementia sufferers will almost double worldwide every two decades, Mr Cameron has said he wants UK government investment in dementia research to rise from £66 million in 2015 to £122m in 2025, with similar increases from the commercial and charitable sectors.

Read more

Ian Sample and agencies

A soldier whose arm was blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan has become the first person in the UK to master a prosthetic limb controlled by thought.

Corporal Andrew Garthwaite, 26, has spent two years learning how to move the arm and grip objects after a six-hour operation to have the limb wired into his body at a medical facility in Vienna.

Continue reading “Soldier controls bionic arm using power of thought” »

The science-fiction-like world of 3D printing is starting to get some very real attention from Wall Street. This week Jefferies initiated coverage on the sector with “buy” ratings on three of its five major players – 3D Systems, Stratasys, and ExOne – and “holds” on the other two, Arcam and voxeljet. These companies could revolutionize mass manufacturing, Jefferies says, and could even get competition from a bellwether of the traditional printing industry: Hewlett Packard.

In a comprehensive, 97-page research note, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek writes that while 3D printing has been around since the 1980′s, a confluence of factors ranging from improvements in printer speeds to a greater availability of software that produces the digital designs used to create 3D printouts have brought the sector into the mainstream, and it will only continue its climb in years to come.

“Our base scenario envisions an eventual expansion of consumer 3D printers from its hobbyist base into a prototyping tool for ‘creative consumers’ and for home printing of toys to become mainstream,” Misek writes, defining ‘creative consumers’ as those who might favor the craft site Etsy. He says that 3D printing could eventually take a $12.5 billion chunk out of the $22 billion U.S. toy market for its ability to recreate action figures, building sets, craft supplies and more. While some companies insist this development is around the corner — 3D Systems is trying to get a $500 consumer 3D printer on the market in time for the 2014 holiday season — Misek thinks such products won’t debut until 2015 or 2016 at the earliest.

Read more