Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla has apparently begun manufacturing its solar roof tiles at its Buffalo, New York, factory, according to Reuters. The company is also starting the process of surveying the homes of people who placed a deposit on the tiles last year for installation purposes. We’ve reached out to Tesla for confirmation.

Preorders for the solar roof tiles began back in May; customers paid $1,000 as a deposit on the product, and US installation was supposed to start in the summer of 2017. However, unsurprisingly, the process was delayed. But now, it looks as though most of the kinks have been worked out, and Reuters reports that the roofs will be installed in coming months.

Tesla claims that the solar roof tiles will cost less than a typical roof, around $21.85 per square foot instead of $24.50. The tiles are a solid option if you’re planning on replacing your roof in the next few years, or if you’re considering solar panels. The tiles look like regular shingles; in fact, not every shingle installed is solar, though you can’t distinguish between the two. You can customize what percentage of your roof tiles are solar in their online tool; the max is 70 percent. Obviously, the more solar panels you install, the more expensive your roof is. The company is still taking preorders with $1,000 deposits. You can sign up at their website if you’re so inclined.

Continue reading “Tesla has finally begun manufacturing solar roof tiles” »

And you thought that 65-inch TV you just bought was big? Sorry, friend.

From afar, it looks like a steampunk chandelier. An intricate collection of tubes and wires that culminate in a small steel cylinder at the bottom. It is, in fact, one of the most sophisticated quantum computers ever built. The processor inside has 50 quantum bits, or qubits, that process tasks in a (potentially) revolutionary way. Normally, information is created and stored as a series of ones and zeroes. Qubits can represent both values at the same time (known as superposition), which means a quantum computer can theoretically test the two simultaneously. Add more qubits and this hard-to-believe computational power increases.

Last November, IBM unveiled the world’s first 50-qubit quantum computer. It lives in a laboratory, inside a giant white case, with pumps to keep it cool and some traditional computers to manage the tasks or algorithms being initiated. At CES this year, the company brought the innards — the wires and tubes required to send signals to the chip and keep the system cool — so reporters and attendees could better understand how it works. The biggest challenge, IBM Research Vice President Jeffrey Welser told me, is isolating the chip from unwanted “noise.” This includes electrical, magnetic and thermal noise — just the temperature of the room renders the whole machine useless.

https://www.facebook.com/letonya.moore.5/videos/1970919586269818/

There’s an unidentified source of infrared throughout the universe. By looking at the specific wavelengths of the light, scientists think that come from carbon—but not just any carbon, a special kind where the atoms are arranged in multiple hexagonal rings. No one has been able to spot one of these multi-ring “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons,” or PAHs in space—even though the infrared emissions imply that these PAHs should make up 10 percent of the universe’s carbon. Now, scientists have found a new hint.

A team of researchers in the United States and Russia are now reporting spotting a special single-carbon-ring-containing molecule, called benzonitrile, with a radio telescope in a part of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud-1. Benzonitrile only has one hexagonal ring of carbon, so it’s not a poly cyclic aromatic hydrocarbon itself. But it could be a potential precursor and could help explain the mysterious radiation.

Before you even ask, yes, this “aromatic” benzonitrile molecule has a smell. “I can tell you from personal experience it smells like almonds,” study first author Brett McGuire from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory told Gizmodo, who has encountered the molecule in the lab.

Continue reading “Astronomers Detect Almond-Scented Molecule That Will Help Solve Interstellar Radiation Mystery” »

Today, editors at Quora asked me to answer a seemingly simple question:

“Is cryptocurrency good for government?”

This is a terrific question, and one that I write about frequently. The question gives me a chance to summarize the key facets of widely mistaken fears. But, here, in the Lifeboat Blog, there is room to elaborate a bit.

In the first phase of cryptocurrency adoption (we are in the midst of this now), there is an abundance of skepticism: Misunderstanding, mistrust, historical comparisons that aren’t comparable, government bans & regulatory proposals—and a lot of questions about intrinsic value, lack of a redemption guaranty, risky open source platforms, tax treatment, etc, etc.

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Researchers have found that by manipulating a single RNA molecule, they can reverse some aspects of cellular aging and regenerate aged cells.

Old cells resist regeneration

As we grow older, our cells gradually age, leading to the development of various diseases. Therefore, inducing cellular regeneration is one of the approaches that researchers are using to combat the age-related diseases associated with cellular aging. Unfortunately, aged cells are often highly resistant to therapies aimed at inducing regeneration.

Continue reading “Zeb2-NAT Molecule May Reverse Cellular Aging” »

In a technology first, a team of NASA engineers has demonstrated fully autonomous X-ray navigation in space—a capability that could revolutionize NASA’s ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond.

The demonstration, which the team carried out with an experiment called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT, showed that millisecond pulsars could be used to accurately determine the location of an object moving at thousands of miles per hour in space—similar to how the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS, provides positioning, navigation, and timing services to users on Earth with its constellation of 24 operating satellites.

“This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration,” said SEXTANT Project Manager Jason Mitchell, an aerospace technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.”

Researchers at Duke University have managed to create functional human muscle tissue using skin cells as the starting point[1]. This research builds on their previous work from 2015, when they grew the first functioning muscle tissue using cells obtained from muscle biopsies[2].

Being able to create muscle cells using non-muscle tissue opens the door for scientists to grow muscle cells in bulk, provides an easier path to genome editing and gene therapies, offers a supply for basic research studies, and could help create personalized models for rare muscle diseases, leading to better patient outcomes.