Lifeboat Foundation

I want one. 😃

Say hello to the EV2 Ripsaw Tank is a luxury 600hp super tank!

For $140000, you can fly your own electric airplane. The Slovenian company Pipistrel sells the Alpha Electro, the first electric aircraft certified as airworthy by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 2018. It’s a welterweight at just 811 pounds (368 kilograms), powered by a 21 kWh battery pack—about one-fifth the power of what you’d find in a Tesla Model S. For about 90 minutes, the pilot training plane will keep you and a companion aloft without burning a drop of fossil fuel.

Those of us without a pilot license will have to wait longer for emissions-free flight—but not much. For all its challenges, 2020 has proven to be a milestone year for electric aviation. Electric aircraft set new distance records, replicated short commercial flight paths, won over the US military, and attracted buyers from big airlines.

And in June, European regulators granted another of Pipistrel’s aircraft, the Velis Electro, the world’s first electric “type certification,” deeming the entire aircraft design safe and ready for mass production (airworthiness only certifies individual aircraft).

Until recently, scientists believed that only very massive nuclei could have excited zero-spin states of increased stability with a significantly deformed shape. Meanwhile, an international team of researchers from Romania, France, Italy, the USA and Poland showed in their latest article that such states also exist in much lighter nickel nuclei. Positive verification of the theoretical model used in these experiments allows describing the properties of nuclei unavailable in Earth laboratories.

More than 99.9 per cent of the mass of an atom comes from the atomic nucleus, the volume of which is over a trillion times smaller than the volume of the entire atom. Hence, the atomic nucleus has an amazing density of about 150 million tons per cubic centimeter. This means that one tablespoon of nuclear matter weighs almost as much as a cubic kilometer of water. Despite their very small size and incredible density, atomic nuclei are complex structures made of protons and neutrons. One may expect that such extremely dense objects would always take spherical form. In reality, however, the situation is quite different: most nuclei are deformed—they exhibit shape flattened or elongated along one or even two axes, simultaneously. To find the favorite form of a given nucleus, it is customary to construct a landscape of the potential energy as a function of deformation. One may visualize such landscape by drawing a map on which the plane coordinates are the deformation parameters, i.e.

On a high, dry terrace overlooking a green river valley in the Andes Mountains of Peru, sits a complex of American pyramids that may be older than the pyramids of Egypt. These structures are remnants of the ancient city of Caral, which some have called the oldest society in the Americas. Caral was built around 5000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, according to groundbreaking research published in Science back in 2001. That origin date places it before the Egyptian pyramids in Africa and roughly 4000 years before the Incan Empire rose to power on the South American continent. That history, and the shear scope of the site, prompted UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to dub it a World Heritage Site in 2009.

These pyramids in Peru are older than the ones in Egypt, and predate the Incan Empire by roughly 4000 years.

A Swiss firm has engineered a one-third scale model of a hybrid-electric aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) or efficient short take-off and landing (STOL) operations. The nifty vehicle will soon be performing its first test flight.

RELATED: NEW EVTOL VERTICAL ROTOR AIRCRAFT JOINS THE AEROSPACE RACE

The firm, called Manta Aircraft, says their new model combines the best features of a helicopter and a plane.

Circa 2018

Hot on the latest Uber Elevate summit this month in Los Angeles, Pipistrel planned the unveiling of its electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft concept to the public.

Continue reading “Pipistrel Unveils Cool Electric VTOL Aircraft Concept For Uber Elevate” »

The craft matches an underwater glider that China builds, which is capable of traveling for weeks and over huge distances.

I have to admit, they really sound “alien-like” if you ask me. 😃

Just when we thought octopuses couldn’t be any weirder, it turns out that they and their cephalopod brethren evolve differently from nearly every other organism on the planet.

In a surprising twist, in April 2017 scientists discovered that octopuses, along with some squid and cuttlefish species, routinely edit their RNA (ribonucleic acid) sequences to adapt to their environment.

Continue reading “Octopus And Squid Evolution Is Officially Stranger Than We Could Have Ever Imagined” »

A pair of monkeys were able to “see” and recognize individual letter shapes generated by arrays of electrodes implanted in their brains – without using their eyes. Previously, sight-restoring implants were placed in the retina, but these new implants were placed in the visual cortex. They achieved the highest resolution yet for such technology.

The research took place at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN). The scientists wanted to develop a way to restore sight for people whose optic nerves were damaged and couldn’t benefit from retina implants. The team, led by Pieter Roelfsema, created a brain implant made of needle-like electrodes 1.5 millimeters in length. They placed it on the animals’ visual cortex, partially restoring its sight.

The visual cortex is like a cinema screen in our skull, with each area on its surface mapping to the visual field. Placing a patch of electrodes on the surface that activate like pixels will make a person “see” whatever points get activated. For example, if an L-shaped pattern of electrodes in contact with the visual cortex is activated, they will see a pixelated L.