Lifeboat Foundation

Move over, Elon Musk and Richard Branson: A Canadian company wants to join the fight for better high-speed train travel.

Toronto-based TransPod recently unveiled plans for a “FluxJet,” a fully-electric transportation system that’s “a hybrid between an aircraft and a train.” The project, currently in the conceptual stage, would involve 82-foot-long, magnetically levitated trains that would carry passengers at roughly 621 miles per hour.

Continue reading “This Canadian company wants to build a train-plane ‘hybrid’ that can go 620 miles per hour—take a look” »

Testing of the trains started four years ago, and their initial implementation date was meant to be in 2021. The pandemic squashed that timeline, but late last month Alstom, the French company making the trains, announced the start of passenger service.

Five Coradia iLint trains started carrying passengers in August, and nine more will replace the diesel trains currently running on a route in Bremervörde, Lower Saxony by the end of this year.

The only byproducts from the trains’ operation are steam and water; any heat created is used to help power their heating and air conditioning systems. They have a range of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), meaning they can run on a single tank of hydrogen for a full day. Their maximum speed is 140 kilometers per hour (87 miles per hour), but their average speeds are lower than this.

One of the major current theories of consciousness is that brain oscillations, also called brain waves, correlate with specific mental states. It is the synchronous waves from different regions, that is, those that are beating at the same rate, that are believed to be important for the connection of different brain regions. Brain waves have been observed for more than a hundred years, but it is still not clear exactly what they are and what they have to do with the function of the brain and the mind.

Oscillations in the brain occur because of an interplay between two forces, such as stimulation and inhibition. This dynamic can either come from two different cortical layers or a cortical and subcortical layer. Feedback properties affect the oscillations by either continuing the give and take of the two forces or changing them in various ways. Even with no outside input, the brain creates spontaneous oscillations; a well-known example is the one, connected to the thalamus and cortex, that occurs during sleep. Currently, it is believed that these oscillations help to synthesize and filter the previous day’s memories. While these oscillations are associated with sleep, most other brain oscillations are not clearly correlated with mental states.

Ever since we’ve had the technology, we’ve looked to the stars in search of alien life. It’s assumed that we’re looking because we want to find other life in the universe, but what if we’re looking to make sure there isn’t any?

The California-based Matternet has been testing its Model M2 drone over the past four years in the US as part of the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) program. Matternet says getting the green light from the FAA could help streamline the process of “implementing new networks and getting approvals.”

Matternet partnered with UPS in 2019 to deliver medical supplies in North Carolina, and later started delivering prescriptions in Florida. Matternet also expanded its footprint to Switzerland, where it teamed up with the Swiss Post to deliver lab samples and blood tests. The program was briefly suspended in 2019 after its drones suffered two crashes in the country, but Matternet has since announced that it’s taking over the Swiss Post’s drone delivery program starting in 2023.

In a statement, the FAA says Matternet’s Model M2 drone “meets all federal regulations for safe, reliable and controllable operations and provides a level of safety equivalent to existing airworthiness standards applicable to other categories of aircraft.” The four-rotor drone’s been approved to carry four-pound payloads and fly at an altitude of 400 feet or lower with a maximum speed of 45mph.

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

By Tyler Benster.

Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? In 2017, Jonas and Kording published a controversial research article, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” that argues maybe not. To make their point, the authors turn to their “model organism” of choice: a MOS 6502 processor as popularized by the Apple I, Commodore 64, and Atari Video Game System. Jonas and Kording argue that for an electrical engineer, a satisfying description of the processor would break it into modules, like an adder or subtractor, and submodules, like the transistor, to form a hierarchy of information processing. They suggest that, while popular methods from neuroscience might reveal interesting structure in the activity of the brain, researchers often use techniques that would fail to reveal a hierarchy of information processing if applied to the (presumably much simpler) computer processor.

Continue reading “Can we reverse engineer the brain like a computer?” »

CityU

Researchers have discovered a low-cost, direct method to turn commonly used 3D printable polymers into lightweight, ultra-tough, biocompatible hybrid carbon microlattices. More importantly, these microlattices are 100 times stronger than regular polymers.

Few things in the Universe keep the beat as reliably as an atom’s pulse.

Yet even the most advanced ‘atomic’ clocks based on variations of these quantum timekeepers lose count when pushed to their limits.

Physicists have known for some time that entangling atoms can help tie particles down enough to squeeze a little more tick from every tock, yet most experiments have only been able to demonstrate this on the smallest of scales.

The global dairy industry is changing. Among the disruptions is competition from food alternatives not produced using animals – including potential challenges posed by synthetic milk.

Synthetic milk does not require cows or other animals. It can have the same biochemical make up as animal milk, but is grown using an emerging biotechnology technique know as “precision fermentation” that produces biomass cultured from cells.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population regularly consume dairy products. There have been increasing calls to move beyond animal-based food systems to more sustainable forms of food production.