Lifeboat Foundation

EV charging network, Blink, kicked off this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by sharing news of seven new charging products, the largest unveiling in its thirteen year history. Blink products include multiple versions of fleet and home chargers, as well as new public chargers and software for customers.

Blink Charging Co. ($BLNK) is an international EV charging network operating over 30,000 ports across thirteen different countries. In addition to charging hardware and services, the Blink Network uses proprietary, cloud-based software that operates and tracks charging stations connected to its network and the charging data they provide.

Blink charging’s strategy promotes mass EV adoption by supporting EV drivers with charging solutions everywhere, whether its at home, work, a public station, or even a fleet depot.

Some of the churn is transitory. It was hard to act on pent-up job dissatisfaction while economies were in free fall, so there is a post-pandemic backlog of job switches to clear. And more quitting now is not the same as sustained job-hopping later. As Melissa Swift of Mercer, a consultancy, notes, white-collar workers in search of higher purpose will choose a new employer carefully and stay longer.

But there is also reason to believe that higher rates of churn are here to stay. The prevalence of remote working means that more roles are plausible options for more jobseekers. And the pandemic has driven home the precariousness of life at the bottom of the income ladder. Resignation rates are highest in industries, like hospitality, that are full of low-wage workers who have lots of potentially risky face-to-face contact with colleagues and customers.

One conventional solution—identifying a few star performers and bunging them extra money—is not a retention strategy if large chunks of the workforce are thinking differently about their jobs. What should managers be doing?

The LCLS-II X-ray laser is 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor and fires 8,000 times faster.

This souped-up getaway on wheels provides a young family with all the comforts of home.

🌱 🤓 This week I helped with the latest experiment going on in the International Space Station plant habitat which cultivates several cotton genotypes. Each of these petri dishes contains undifferentiated masses of cotton cells known as a calli. Cotton is highly resistant to the process of plant regeneration, making it difficult to engineer stable, reproducing plants that have specific or enhanced traits such as drought resistance. The investigation could provide a better understanding of this behavior and could ultimately improve our ability to grow crop plants on Earth and in space.

Photo credit: Mark Vande Hei.

Tens of thousands of residents in the US state of Colorado have been forced to evacuate due to quickly spreading wildfires.

Hundreds of homes have been destroyed in some of the worst fires the state has ever seen. Powerful winds have fueled the fast-moving flames which come after an unusually dry autumn and low levels of snow. At least one first responder and six others have been injured since the fires began.

Continue reading “Colorado fires destroy hundreds of homes | DW News” »

A Virginia family received the keys to their new 3D-printed home just in time for Christmas. The home is Habitat for Humanity’s first 3D-printed home in the nation, according to a Habitat news release. The 1,200-square-foot home has three bedrooms, two full baths and was built from concrete.

Toyota’s cleaning robot has demonstrated new skills, revealing an ability to detect clear objects and snap perfect selfies.

The challenge: While seeing a reflection in a toaster isn’t going to stop us from knowing that it’s a toaster, robots can be easily confused by reflections, as well as transparent objects, such as glasses and windows.

Continue reading “Toyota’s cleaning robot shows off its new skills” »

“Interstellar Travel and Post-Humans” by Martin Rees is one of the chapters of the book “The Next Step: Exponential Life”.

Astronomers like myself are professionally engaged in thinking about huge expanses of space and time. We view our home planet in a cosmic context. We wonder whether there is life elsewhere in the cosmos. But, more significantly, we are mindful of the immense future that lies ahead—the post-human future where our remote descendants may transcend human limitations—here on Earth but (more probably) far beyond. This is my theme in the present chapter.

The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. But the even longer time-horizons that stretch ahead—though familiar to every astronomer —have not permeated our culture to the same extent. Our Sun is less than half way through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it has got six billion more before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporizing any life that might still remain on Earth. But even after the Sun’s demise, the expanding universe will continue—perhaps forever—destined to become ever colder, ever emptier.

Continue reading “Interstellar Travel and Post-Humans” »