Lifeboat Foundation

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If you don’t like mushrooms, it might be because you haven’t tried them yet in dress or jacket form. Believe it or not, mushrooms can now be fashioned into flexible leather-like clothing, purses, pants, and even durable furniture and building bricks for a cleaner, more sustainable planet. Phil Ross and his team at the San Francisco-based MycoWorks, a group of engineers, designers, and scientists, are developing products inspired by fungi’s lattice-like “roots,” called mycelium. According to the MycoWorks website, mycelium are carbon-negative and can also be naturally dyed any color, so your mushroom dress or house can be bright purple, fuchsia, or Cerulean blue if tan seems too subtle.

According to the website of Italy’s Mogu agency, which specializes in developing and scaling-up a range of mycelium-based technologies for the production of naturally-grown biomaterials and products, mushroom-based fabric can be tweaked to be as hard as enamel and shell-like or as soft and porous as a sponge, depending on the amount of light, humidity, exchange of gas, temperature, and types of “food” the mushroom is given (hemp, straw, etc.), rendering it as the ideal creative material for whatever you envision forging.

Continue reading “Clothing Made Of Mushrooms Might Just Be The Future — And It’s Actually Pretty Cool” »

Electricity could be beamed to your home using microwave technology instead of copper lines.

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To learn more about the science behind a dog’s ability to find its way home, researchers tracked the 27 hunting dogs representing 10 breeds as they roamed the woods.

Crop yields for apples, cherries and blueberries across the United States are being reduced by a lack of pollinators, according to Rutgers-led research, the most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and wild bees for pollination, so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about food security, notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning crop production would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for native bee species and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=K0yNvk8JV-8

Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley made history getting to the space station. Now they’re coming home.

Storage is just as important aboard the International Space Station as it is on Earth. While the space station is about the size of a football field, the living space inside is much smaller than that. Just as you wouldn’t store garden tools in a house when you could store them in a shed outside, astronauts now have a “housing unit” in which they can store tools for use on the exterior of the space station.

On Dec. 5, 2019, a protective storage unit for robotic tools called Robotic Tool Stowage (RiTS) was among the items launched to station as part of SpaceX’s 19^th commercial resupply services mission for NASA. As part of a spacewalk on July 21, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Chris Cassidy installed the “robot hotel” where the tools are stored to the station’s Mobile Base System (MBS), where it will remain a permanent fixture. The MBS is a moveable platform that provides power to the external robots. This special location allows RiTS to traverse around the station alongside a robot that will use the tools it stores.

Carnegie Mellon today showed off new research into the world of robotic navigation. With help from the team at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), the university has designed a semantic navigation that helps robots navigate around by recognizing familiar objects.

The SemExp system, which beat out Samsung to take first place in a recent Habitat ObjectNav Challenge, utilizes machine learning to train the system to recognize objects. That goes beyond simple superficial traits, however. In the example given by CMU, the robot is able to distinguish an end table from a kitchen table, and thus extrapolate in which room it’s located. That should be more straightforward, however, with a fridge, which is both pretty distinct and is largely restricted to a singe room.

“D-Theory of Time, or Digital Presentism, gives us a coherent picture of temporal ontology: In the absence of observers, the arrow of time doesn’t exist — there’s no cosmic flow of time. With that in mind, your timeless cosmic self resides as a hyperdimensional being outside the ordinary space-time dimensionality of your experiential self… In fact, if we are to create high fidelity first-person simulated realities that also may be part of intersubjectivity-based, multiplayer virtualities, D-Theory of Time gives us a clear-cut guiding principle for doing just that.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Physics of Time: D-Theory of Time & Temporal Mechanics.

This designer theme, #DTheoryofTime, is currently offered in a variety of 67 high-quality products from fancy home decor and wall art to stylish clothing, gadgetry and accessories for you to make a bold statement, to stand out from the crowd or to simply keep you excited throughout the day:

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