Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos today put a spotlight on the construction of a giant rocket production facility in Florida for his Blue Origin space venture – but he also gave a shout-out to the engine production team back in Kent, Wash.

In an email to Blue Origin’s fans, Bezos noted that ground has been broken for an orbital vehicle manufacturing site at Exploration Park, just south of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Ground-clearing actually began last month.)

“The 750,000-square-foot rocket factory is custom-built from the ground up to accommodate manufacturing, processing, integration and testing,” Bezos wrote. In comparison, the production facility in Kent where Blue Origin is building rocket engines and its New Shepard suborbital spaceships takes in about 300,000 square feet.

Continue reading “Jeff Bezos provides a sneak peek at Blue Origin’s orbital rocket factory in Florida” »

Very fascinating!

A humanoid named Jia Jia has been attracting a lot of attention at the 2016 Summer Davos Forum in Tianjin, China.

Continue reading “This Chinese Robot is Said to Be ‘The Most Realistic Ever Made’” »

This is a nice story on the future. If you’re flying British Airways, give it a read in the print version:

Two very different versions of the near future, when robots have taken half our jobs.

Nice.

Lasers and microwaves control the switching of individual qubits in a 3D array more precisely.

Awesome!

What if industrial waste water could become fuel? With affordable, long-lasting catalysts, water could be split to produce hydrogen that could be used to power fuel cells or combustion engines.

By conducting complex simulations, scientists showed that adding lithium to aluminum nanoparticles results in orders-of-magnitude faster water-splitting reactions and higher hydrogen production rates compared to pure aluminum nanoparticles. The lithium allowed all the aluminum atoms to react, which increased yields (Nano Letters, “Hydrogen-on-demand using metallic alloy nanoparticles in water”).

Continue reading “Atomic-scale simulations predict how to use nanoparticles to increase hydrogen production” »

According to The Clarion Project, a political information bureau that warns westerners of the growing threat from radical Islam, ISIS has published a ‘kill list’ that includes the names, addresses and emails of 15,000 Americans.

So far, this is interesting news, but it is not really new. I found ISIS, Hezbollah and Al-Qaida kill lists going back at least 8 years. This 2012 bulletin complains that NBC would not release the names contained on a kill list.

A kill list is newsworthy, and the Clarion article is interesting—but the article has more “facts” with which the publisher wishes to generate mob frenzy…

• It explains that 4,000 of the names on the Kill List have been leaked by hackers
• It echos a report by Circa News that the FBI has decided to not inform citizens that they are on the ISIS kill list.

In a clear effort to whip up and direct audience indignation, it asks readers to take a one-question poll. Which answer would you choose?

Continue reading “Do you have a right to view an ISIS Kill List?” »

Get great shots of those hard to reach places.

With a radio specifically designed to communicate through tissue, Professors David Blaauw (http://web.eecs.umich.edu/faculty/blaauw/) and David Wentzloff (http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~wentzlof/) from the University of Michigan’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (https://www.eecs.umich.edu/ece/) are adding another level to a computer platform small enough to fit inside a medical grade syringe.

With this enabling technology, real time information can be applied to devices monitoring heart fibrillation as well as glucose monitoring for diabetics.

Continue reading “Injectable Computers” »

Different species of animals either live a very long time or do not die of old age. Some cases are the tortoise & lobster species that live to be over 130 years old naturally and don’t usually die unless they get sick or are killed.

After we grow up our cells ultimately stop self-replicating. A researcher named Leonard Hayflick figured out that each of our cells divide around 50 times and then they stop. Once all of our cells stop duplicating we start to deteriorate and then ultimately die. This finding showed that we are in fact programmed to die biologically.