Lifeboat Foundation

A ‘brane’ is a dynamical object that can propagate through spacetime. Flattening a spacecraft into a membrane, or 2-brane, can produce a low mass vehicle with ultra-high power-to-weight ratio (7.7 kW/kg using thin film solar cells). If most of this power is used by an array of thinned, distributed electrospray thrusters with a specific impulse of 4000 s, a Brane Craft could start in low Earth orbit, land on Phobos, and return to low Earth orbit.

Other possible targets include any near-Earth asteroid and most main belt asteroids. Propellant is stored as a liquid within a 10-micron wide gap between two Kapton sheets that form the main structure of the Brane Craft.

This NASA NIAC project will study how to design an ultra-light dynamic membrane spacecraft, with 3-axis attitude determination and control plus navigation, that can significantly change both its shape and orbit. Conventional sensors like star trackers will have to be replaced by 2-dimensional alternatives. Estimated mass is about 35 grams for a 1 square meter Brane Craft.

Continue reading “Membrane spacecraft with 7.7 kW/kg power-to-weight ratio and 4000 ISP” »

There’ll be 10,000 private space companies started in the next decade. This is what it’s like to launch a future possible “space unicorn.”

“This technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications,” says Krishnaswamy, director of the Columbia High-Speed and Mm-wave IC (CoSMIC) Lab. “Our circulator is the first to be put on a silicon chip, and we get literally orders of magnitude better performance than prior work. Full-duplex communications, where the transmitter and the receiver operate at the same time and at the same frequency, has become a critical research area and now we’ve shown that WiFi capacity can be doubled on a nanoscale silicon chip with a single antenna. This has enormous implications for devices like smartphones and tablets.”

Krishnaswamy’s group has been working on silicon radio chips for full duplex communications for several years and became particularly interested in the role of the circulator, a component that enables full-duplex communications where the transmitter and the receiver share the same antenna. In order to do this, the circulator has to “break” Lorentz Reciprocity, a fundamental physical characteristic of most electronic structures that requires electromagnetic waves travel in the same manner in forward and reverse directions.

“Reciprocal circuits and systems are quite restrictive because you can’t control the signal freely,” says PhD student Negar Reiskarimian, who developed the circulator and is lead author of the Nature Communications paper. “We wanted to create a simple and efficient way, using conventional materials, to break Lorentz Reciprocity and build a low-cost nanoscale circulator that would fit on a chip. This could open up the door to all kinds of exciting new applications.”

Continue reading “WiFi capacity doubled at less than half the size” »

The sky above Osaka Bay is saturated in light pollution teeming from the neon-soaked metropolis below. Military bi-copters circle in patterns between the antenna towers of Niihama City’s looming skyscrapers as they survey the scene of an ongoing domestic security operation. Kneeling from atop the edge of one of these towers is a figure; a mauve-haired saboteur of the state clad in a leotard, side holster, and leather jacket. Combat boots and leggings hiked just past her knees with her upper thighs left exposed. An external HD cable juts from a small input jack indented at the base of her neck.

Her pupils dilate, sifting through the visual noise of an embedded surveillance feed while combing the room below for suspicious movements. She detaches the cable at her subordinate’s signal, stands upright and removes her clothing. She leans over the edge of the building, a smirk streaking across her otherwise stoic expression. A rappel line heaves sharply, suspending her body directly adjacent to that of her target, who is now only a trigger pull from annihilation.

Check out this PBS article on other 2016 presidential candidates (including Transhumanist Party). One of the main goals of my campaign is to try to help challenge the monopolistic 2-party system in America:

If you were asked who is running for president, you’d probably list the five candidates still running for the major political party nominations: Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. But there are lots of candidates running either from lesser-known parties or without any party affiliation. Here are 16 independent presidential candidates running in 2016:

Carbon nanotubes in a dish assemble themselves into a nanowire in seconds under the influence of a custom-built Tesla coil created by scientists at Rice University.

But the scientists don’t limit their aspirations for the phenomenon they call Teslaphoresis to simple nanowires.

Continue reading “Nanotubes assemble! Rice introduces Teslaphoresis” »

As solid state drives get more and more cheaper, we will get to see larger capacity storage peripherals, with 18TB hard drives getting announced soon.

This new method of pain treatment can prevent risky side-effects such as addiction, dependence, and overdose-related deaths — and it does so using electricity.

Abuse of prescription pain killers or opioid medicines is common. But then again, how else can you treat chronic pain? Unfortunately, addiction is a terrible side-effect that can lead to overdose-related deaths.

But now a research team from the University of Arlington seems to have found a better and more efficient solution: Electrical stimulation.

Continue reading “New Device Can Ease Chronic Pain Without Drugs, Thanks to Brain Stimulation” »

Proposed in 2014, the one-atom engine is now real.