Lifeboat Foundation

SpaceX has tested the emergency chutes that could save astronauts’ lives during a launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A new video shared by the company on X-formerly-Twitter shows a person dressed in a black and white SpaceX spacesuit zipping down from the tower’s crew pad inside a tube of red and white fabric, an equally exhilarating and terrifying ordeal — especially considering the threat of an exploding rocket right behind you.

“Even though it’s meant to be used for emergencies, it looks like a lot of fun!” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk commented in a tweet.

A professor has developed a groundbreaking theory that provides a universal method for predicting melting points, addressing a century-old challenge in physics and offering significant benefits to materials science.

A longstanding problem in physics has finally been cracked by Professor Kostya Trachenko of Queen Mary University of London’s School of Physical and Chemical Sciences. His research, published in the Physical Review E, unveils a general theory for predicting melting points, a fundamental property whose understanding has baffled scientists for over a century.

Understanding States of Matter.

MAWI United, a studio specializing in creating lifelike 3D environments, has once again pushed photorealism to the next level by presenting Dead Spruce Forest Tree Biome, a new procedural environment asset pack that lets you create AAA-quality forests in Unreal Engine 5.

Featuring over 200 photogrammetry-made plant, debris, and tree assets, as well as full Nanite support, the pack has everything you need to build next-level environments for your games and projects. As usual, MAWI’s latest creation comes with tools for procedural forest generation and interactive foliage and an advanced ground material with five different surface types (forest, meadow, wetland, stones, dirt) that automatically generates all the small ground cover and foliage.

NASA is debating whether to work with commercial partners to get to Mars.

And while SpaceX is the “elephant in the room,” as Ars Technica put it, NASA is keeping its options wide open.

It’s a notable change, as the first time the space agency has openly raised the possibility of working with private space companies to reach Mars.

Anthropogenic plastic pollution is often experienced through evocative images of marine animals caught in floating debris, yet its reach is far more expansive. The polar regions of the Arctic and Antarctica are increasingly experiencing the impacts of plastic reaching floating ice and land, not solely as larger macroplastics (>5 cm), but as microplastics (0.1 µm—5 mm) and nanoplastics (<0.1 µm) that may be carried vast distances from their source or be ingested in more populated areas during seasonal migration.

In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering what the hell crypto has to do with conservation.

Anthropic’s new AI chatbot Claude 3 Opus has already made headlines for its bizarre behavior, like claiming to fear death.

Now, Ars Technica reports, a prompt engineer at the Google-backed company claims that they’ve seen evidence that Claude 3 is self-aware, as it seemingly detected that it was being subjected to a test. Many experts are skeptical, however, further underscoring the controversy of ascribing humanlike characteristics to AI models.

“It did something I have never seen before from an LLM,” the prompt engineer, Alex Albert, posted on X, formerly Twitter.

Using sugarcane waste as bricks for construction.

Architecture studio Grimshaw and the University of East London have collaborated to create Sugarcrete, a biomaterial construction block with an interlocking shape made from the sugarcane by-product bagasse.

Sugarcrete was developed to be a low-cost and low-carbon reusable construction-material alternative to brick and concrete.

Continue reading “Grimshaw and UEL develop sugarcane-waste construction blocks” »

Petunias that glow in the dark are a thing now. The genetically modified flowers actually generate their own light, and are now legal to sell.