Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — Satellite electric propulsion startup Apollo Fusion is expanding its product line through an agreement with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, giving it access to advanced Hall thruster technology.

The Silicon Valley-based company said May 7 that it signed a deal that gives it an exclusive worldwide commercial license for JPL’s Magnetically Shielded Miniature, or MaSMi, Hall thruster technology, as well as a contract to provide JPL with three thrusters that use that technology.

Apollo Fusion plans to use the MaSMi technology in an electric thruster called the Apollo Xenon Engine (AXE), which will provide higher performance than the existing electric thrusters that the company has been developing.

Continue reading “Apollo Fusion Obtains Hall Thruster Technology from JPL” »

New Features

The car is lower to the ground, with large, narrow wheels closer to the front and back ends of the car, all of which are expected to improve the car’s range, per The Guardian.

Dyson CEO and namesake James Dyson sent an email out to all the staff members urging secrecy around the project, but defended the decision to file these new patents, writing that the car would “include fundamentally new technologies and make some inventive leaps,” according to the Guardian.

Continue reading “Vacuum Maker Dyson Patents Off-Road Electric Car” »

A new therapy to re-engage the heart’s natural electrical pathways—instead of bypassing them—could mean more treatment options for heart failure patients who also suffer from electrical disturbances, such as arrhythmias, according to research led by the University of Chicago Medicine.

In a first-ever pilot study, called the His SYNC trial, researchers compared the effectiveness of two different cardiac resynchronization therapies, or treatments to correct irregularities in the heartbeat through implanted pacemakers and defibrillators. The current standard of care, known as biventricular pacing, uses two pacing impulses in both lower chambers, whereas the newer approach, called His bundle pacing, attempts to work toward engaging and restoring the heart’s natural physiology. The two approaches have never before been directly compared in a head-to-head clinical trial.

“This is the first prospective study in our field to compare outcomes between different ways to achieve cardiac resynchronization,” said cardiologist Roderick Tung, MD, FHRS, the Director of Cardiac Electrophysiology & EP Laboratories at the University of Chicago Medicine. “Through His bundle pacing, we’re trying to tap into the normal wiring of the heart and restore conduction the way nature intended. Previously, we have just accepted that we had to bypass it through pacing two ventricles at a time.”

Continue reading “Treatment to restore natural heartbeat could be on the horizon for heart failure” »

A remote-controlled ship carrying British oysters to Belgium becomes the first cargo vessel in the world to traverse the seas without a crew…

A boat carrying a cargo of British oysters across the English Channel has become the world’s first ever shipment completed using remote control.

Continue reading “Ship carrying oysters is world’s first remote-controlled cargo trip” »

At mysterious invite-only event in Washington D.C. and suggests his firm will hit VP Pence’s 2024 deadline for putting humans back on the surface…

On stage, Bezos took the wraps off a massive model of what will be the firm’s first lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon. The event kicked off at 4 p.m. in Washington D.C, and was not live streamed.

Continue reading “Blue Origin is ‘going to the MOON’: Jeff Bezos unveils lunar lander” »

Australia has approved the use of CRISPR gene editing tool on plants and animals without the oversight of a governmental body. The controversial move has been called a ‘middle ground’ compared to regulations on other countries.

Tiny light-emitting microalgae, found in the ocean, could hold the secret to the next generation of organic solar cells, according to new research carried out at the Universities of Birmingham and Utrecht.

Microalgae are probably the oldest surviving living organisms on the planet. They have evolved over billions of years to possess light harvesting systems that are up to 95 per cent efficient. This enables them to survive in the most extreme environments, and adapt to changes our world has seen over this time-span.

Unravelling how this system works could yield important clues about how it could be used or recreated for use in new, super-efficient organic solar panels. Because of the complexity of the organisms and the huge variety of different species, however, progress in this area has been limited.

Continue reading “Secrets of fluorescent microalgae could lead to super-efficient solar cells” »

Researchers trained the 165-pound ‘humanoid robot’ to walk across narrow terrain by using human-like control, perception and planning algorithms. The video shows the robot, called Atlas, carefully moving across a balance beam using body control created using LIDAR…

Researchers from the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition in Florida have created a robot that uses a planning algorithm to balance its way across an uneven path of cinder blocks.

Continue reading “Humanoid robot delicately ‘walks a tightrope’ of tiny blocks” »

From autonomous nuclear submarines to algorithms detecting a threat, to robot-guided high-speed missiles, artificial intelligence could revolutionise nuclear weapons – risking some profound ethical conundrums – a recent report reveals.