Lifeboat Foundation

A couple of ex-Googlers set out to create the search engine of the future. They built something faster, simpler, and ad-free. So how come you’ve never heard of Neeva?

Sridhar Ramaswamy didn’t leave Google to build another search engine. At least not at first. At the close of his 15-year tenure at Google, Ramaswamy was running the company’s entire advertising division, overseeing more than 10,000 people — he knew better than most exactly how much work it took to do search well.

You almost can’t overstate how dominant Google is in search. Most studies put Google at about 90 percent of the global search market, and that number has been steadily climbing for 20 years. Google is the default search… More.

Continue reading “How a start-up built the search engine of the future — and then died” »

Engineers successfully tested hybrid printed circuits at the edge of space in an April 25 sounding rocket flight from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility near Chincoteague, Virginia. Electronic temperature and humidity sensors printed onto the payload bay door and onto two attached panels monitored the entire SubTEC-9 sounding rocket mission, recording data that was beamed to the ground. The experiment by aerospace engineer Beth Paquette and electronics engineer Margaret Samuels of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, sought to prove the space-readiness of printed electronics technology.

Printing electronic circuits on the walls and structures of spacecraft could help future missions do more in smaller packages.

Join the discussion on this paper page.

A post on the Croppie website, for crop circle enthusiasts, described the new pictogram as a ‘reproduction, remaster, even, of the most iconic crop circle of all time’ Cover versions might never quite be as good as the original – but this remaster of a rock classic looks just like the real thing.

Researchers think they understand the conditions which see the precious stones erupt to the Earth’s surface from far below where they are formed.

The ancient town comes with pyramids, buildings, stone columns, and a ball field.

In Denver, people can now turn their bilingual skills into cash — and perhaps a promising future — thanks to a first-of-its-kind program being rolled out by the Denver Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs in which residents will be able to get free interpreter training and a chance at contract work with the city.

DOIRA officials are looking for anyone who is proficient in English and one of more than a dozen listed languages, including Vietnamese, Amharic, Cantonese, Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, French, Burmese, Karen, Farsi, Somali, Nepali, Korean, Urdu, Haitian Creole, Khmer Armenian and Swahili, and are open to those who speak additional dialects, as well.

With the city welcoming more and more foreign-born residents — including refugees looking for help with local services — the Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs is in need of interpreters. It plans to start training polyglots next month, with classes beginning on August 21 and running for about three weeks.

Continue reading “Denver Offers to Train Interpreters for Free to Deal With Influx of Foreigners” »

Just last week, the US Department of Agriculture gave the green light to two companies to make and sell their cultivated chicken products in the US. This is a major moment for the field—even if a lot of milestones are left ahead. In a stroke of luck, this week I’m at a conference called Future Food Tech, where people are talking about the biggest news and challenges for alternative proteins of all types. So for the newsletter this week, let’s check in on the world of lab-grown meat.

Reaching commercial production won’t be easy.

China’s rising threat has splintered Europe while creating a need for global leadership.