Lifeboat Foundation

Water worlds are exciting targets for planetary scientists.

FAA approves the first Category 2 drone for flight over people with AVSS PRS-M3DT parachute: drones with DJI dock.

A new NASA-funded study has revealed for the first time that the airflow in supersonic combusting jet engines can be controlled by an optical sensor.

The finding can lead to more efficient stabilization of hypersonic jet aircraft, according to the study carried out by the researchers at the University of Virginia, School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The research allows operators to control airflow at the speed of light when a ‘shock train’ occurs. A shock train is a condition that precedes engine failure within a scramjet engine.

The ferroelectric material transistor could be used to make NVMe SSDs last a whole lot longer.

Imagine a crew of astronauts headed to Mars. About 140 million miles away from Earth, they discover their spacecraft has a cracked O-ring. But instead of relying on a dwindling cache of spare parts, what if they could simply fabricate any part they needed on demand?

A team of Berkeley researchers, led by Ph.D. student Taylor Waddell, may have taken a giant leap toward making this option a reality. On June 8, they sent their 3D printing technology to space for the first time as part of the Virgin Galactic 7 mission.

Their next-generation microgravity printer—dubbed SpaceCAL—spent 140 seconds in suborbital space while aboard the VSS Unity space plane. In that short time span, it autonomously printed and post-processed a total of four test parts, including space shuttles and benchy figurines from a liquid plastic called PEGDA.

At the mere flick of a magnetic field, mice engineered with nanoparticle-activated ‘switches’ inside their brains were driven to feed, socialize, and act like clucky new mothers in an experiment designed to test an innovative research tool.

While ’mind control’ animal experiments are far from new, they have generally relied on cumbersome electrodes tethering the subject to an external system, which not only requires invasive surgery but also sets limits on how freely the test subject can move about.

In what is claimed to be a breakthrough in neurology, researchers from the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea have developed a method for targeting pathways in the brain using a combination of genetics, nanoparticles, and magnetic fields.

TSMC making semiconductor fabs in the US has Intel Foundry grabbing as much TSMC senior engineer talent it can for its own foundry business.

Researchers create a 2D array of molecular switches with 12 controllable states per molecule, showing promise for next-generation ultra-high-density memory systems.

In a study published in Device (“Self-powered electrostatic tweezer for adaptive object manipulation”), a research team led by Dr. DU Xuemin from the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has reported a new self-powered electrostatic tweezer that offers superior accumulation and tunability of triboelectric charges, enabling unprecedented flexibility and adaptability for manipulating objects in various working scenarios.

The ability to manipulate objects using physical tweezers is essential in fields such as physics, chemistry, and biology. However, conventional tweezers often require complex electrode arrays and external power sources, have limited charge-generation capabilities, or produce undesirable temperature rises.

The newly proposed self-powered electrostatic tweezer (SET) features a polyvinylidene fluoride trifluoroethylene (P(VDF-TrFE))-based self-powered electrode (SE) that generates large and tunable surface charge density through the triboelectric effect, along with a dielectric substrate that functions as both a tribo-counter material and a supportive platform, and a slippery surface to reduce resistance and biofouling during object manipulation.