Lifeboat Foundation

“We are excited to partner with Hatzolah Air on the development of our CityHawk EMS vehicle,” says Rafi Yoeli, CEO of Urban Aeronautics. “Its compact size will enable it to land in the middle of a busy city street, making it a perfect fit for medical evacuation missions by dramatically decreasing the time it takes to arrive on-scene, treat and transport sick or injured patients to appropriate medical facilities.”

For those of you unfamiliar with the CityHawk, it’s much, much more than a few concept drawings. The vehicle has been in development since the company’s inception in 2001, and an unmanned version of the CityHawk has been flying successfully for at least a year. Successfully enough, at least, to merit an agreement of, “mutual exploration by Boeing and Tactical Robotics of Autonomous Unmanned VTOL aircraft based on Urban Aeronautics … unique Fancraft™ technology.”

A multitasking nanomachine that can act as a heat engine and a refrigerator at the same time has been created by RIKEN engineers. The device is one of the first to test how quantum effects, which govern the behavior of particles on the smallest scale, might one day be exploited to enhance the performance of nanotechnologies.

Conventional heat engines and refrigerators work by connecting two pools of fluid. Compressing one pool causes its fluid to heat up, while rapidly expanding the other pool cools its fluid. If these operations are done in a periodic cycle, the pools will exchange energy and the system can be used as either a heat engine or a fridge.

It would be impossible to set up a macroscale machine that does both tasks simultaneously—nor would engineers want to, says Keiji Ono of the RIKEN Advanced Device Laboratory. “Combining a traditional heat engine with a refrigerator would make it a completely useless machine,” he says. “It wouldn’t know what to do.”

Aaron Saunders, Boston Dynamics’ VP of Engineering, tells us where Atlas got its moves from.

During its two-year mission, SphereX will map the entire sky four times, creating an enormous database of stars, galaxies, nebulas and other celestial objects.

The space telescope will be NASA’s first to build a full-sky spectroscopy map in near-infrared, and it will observe a total of 102 near-infrared colours.

Continue reading “NASA to launch SphereX telescope into space in 2024” »

Andrew Steele is a scientist, writer and presenter.

Ageing is a phenomenon we’re all familiar with and is completely taken for granted as a fact of reality, but do we have to accept.

Continue reading “Why We Get Old & How We Can Stop It” »

Re-shring video of China’s autonomous KFC truck. 😃

Craving fried chicken during quarantine?

This robot will help people disinfect rooms with UV lights.

😃

Germicidal irradiation.

This video shows a boat developed to remove plastic waste from rivers.

Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas increased his price target on shares to $810, the highest mark on Wall Street. At that price, the EV giant’s stock would be valued at $990 billion in aggregate.