Lifeboat Foundation

Many children grow up gazing up at the night sky, dreaming of becoming astronauts who boldly go to the Moon – and beyond.

But in order to get that elusive job, would-be astronauts must make it through a competitive selection process. For NASA’s 2021 class of astronauts, the space agency said it chose just 10 candidates from more than 12,000 applicants.

Continue reading “Here’s How NASA Determines Which Applicants Make It to Be Astronauts” »

The flying fuel tank’s flight “was arguably aviation’s last milestone.”

Nearly 36 years ago, on December 23, 1986, pilots Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, designer Burt Rutan, and crew chief Bruce Evans earned the Collier Trophy, aviation’s most prestigious award, according to a NASA report published in 2013.

Continue reading “Marvelous engineering of Voyager: The aircraft that traveled around the world without refueling” »

Lazarus, built by university students, made its longest flight time yet.

Students at the University of Southampton have a special project they have been working on for years together. That is, to power flight using only the muscle power of a single pilot, technically known as human-powered aircraft (HPA). Earlier this year, the team won their first Formula Flight competition with their design dubbed Lazarus.

Continue reading “Human-powered aircraft: A plane with ‘impossible engineering’ and no engine” »

Researchers at Penn Engineering have created a chip that outstrips the security and robustness of existing quantum communications hardware. Their technology communicates in “qudits,” doubling the quantum information space of any previous on-chip laser.

Liang Feng, Professor in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) and Electrical Systems and Engineering (ESE), along with MSE postdoctoral fellow Zhifeng Zhang and ESE Ph.D. student Haoqi Zhao, debuted the technology in a recent study published in Nature. The group worked in collaboration with scientists from the Polytechnic University of Milan, the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems, Duke University and the City University of New York (CUNY).

A new technology developed at Tel Aviv University makes it possible to destroy cancerous tumors in a targeted manner, via a combination of ultrasound and the injection of nanobubbles into the bloodstream. According to the research team, unlike invasive treatment methods or the injection of microbubbles into the tumor itself, this latest technology enables the destruction of the tumor in a non-invasive manner.

The study was conducted under the leadership of doctoral student Mike Bismuth from the lab of Dr. Tali Ilovitsh at Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, in collaboration with Dr. Dov Hershkovitz of the Department of Pathology. Prof. Agata Exner from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland also participated in the study. The study was published in the journal Nanoscale.

Dr. Tali Ilovitsh says that their “new technology makes it possible, in a relatively simple way, to inject nanobubbles into the bloodstream, which then congregate in the area of the cancerous tumor. After that, using a low-frequency ultrasound, we explode the nanobubbles, and thereby the tumor.”

Asphaltenes, a byproduct of crude oil production, are a waste material with potential. Rice University scientists are determined to find it by converting the carbon-rich resource into useful graphene.

Muhammad Rahman, an assistant research professor of materials science and nanoengineering, is employing Rice’s unique flash Joule heating process to convert asphaltenes instantly into turbostratic (loosely aligned) graphene and mix it into composites for thermal, anti-corrosion and 3D-printing applications.

The process makes good use of material otherwise burned for reuse as fuel or discarded into tailing ponds and landfills. Using at least some of the world’s reserve of more than 1 trillion barrels of asphaltene as a feedstock for graphene would be good for the environment as well.

face_with_colon_three circa 2018.

Meagan Moore, a Biological and Agricultural Engineering student from Louisiana State University (LSU) has 3D printed a full-size model of the human body for use in radiotherapy.

Such models used in radiotherapy mimic the human tissue, and in medical terms are known as imaging phantoms or phantoms. They are used in radiotherapy to estimate the amount of dose delivery and distribution. A customized phantom of a patient can make the whole process more precise.

Continue reading “Louisiana State University 3D prints full-body ‘human’ for radiotherapy” »

Guarding Against Future Global Biological Risks — Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD — Chair Nuclear Threat Initiative, bio Advisory Group; Commissioner, Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense; former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, MD is an internationally recognized leader in public health and medicine, who currently serves as chair of the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) bio Advisory Group (https://www.nti.org/about/people/margaret-hamburg-md/), where she has also served as founding vice president and senior scientist. She also currently holds a role as Commissioner on the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense (https://biodefensecommission.org/teams/margaret-a-hamburg/).

Continue reading “Dr. Peggy Hamburg, MD — Chair, Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), bio Advisory Group” »

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All of our civilization exists only a thin layer of Earth’s surface, and our deepest mines barely scratch our planet. We often talk about finding new mineral resources on other worlds or asteroids in the future, but are we ignore a treasure beneath our feet, and what other technologies and engineering might we utilize in Earth’s depths?

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Continue reading “Accessing Earth’s Core” »