Lifeboat Foundation

It takes millions of years for natural processes to convert plants into gasoline, but researchers at Ghent University have figured out how to do it much faster. By pre-treating grass to make it break down quicker, and then adding Clostridium bacteria similar to that found in your gut, they produced decane, one of the main ingredients of gasoline and jet fuel. While decane is a polluting fuel, commercial jets will need it for at least the next few decades, and the researchers believe their process is efficient enough to make it commercially feasible.

For their system to work, the scientists first treated the grass with a compound that broke it down and made it easier for bacteria to digest. They then treated it with an enriched Clostridium bacteria from the family that makes up the good bacteria in your gut, rather than the one that kills you. Fermentation much like that used for beer produced lactic acid and its derivatives, and further treatment yielded caproic acids. With further processing, that was converted into decane, a primary ingredient of gasoline and jet fuel.

As mentioned, decane and similar products aren’t very clean fuels (they produce CO₂ when burned), but they still have a much higher energy density than, say, lithium batteries. As such, be the main fuel used in aviation for the foreseeable future, as jet planes need to be relatively light to get aloft.

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Brick Laying Robot

This construction robot can lay bricks 6 times faster than you.

Sorry, Google and Apple: The smartphone, one day, will die. Here’s what comes after.

Its six compact jet engines will send you hurtling through the sky at 100 mph.

The media is bursting at its seams with what seems to be the superhero revolution. Comic book publishers like Marvel and DC have spilled over onto the big screen, and now it may look as though they’re spilling over into our technology in the real world. While we have been making efforts at a superhero heads up display or an iron man workout suit, we are also inching our way up to a functional flight suit.

Gravity is a British technology start-up started by Richard Browning on March 31, 2017. The company has developed a human propulsion system to re-imagine manned flight. With miniaturized jet engines and a customized exoskeleton, the Daedalus is expected to push us into a new era of aviation. Browning and his team developed the suit over the course of 2016, with the team’s journey covered in this short documentary:

Consciousness is the result of an inevitable vortex of self-mirroring.

These chips could be the future of medical diagnostics.

The neuroscience behind the Impossible Burger.

The Impossible Burger is meatless, but it tastes, smells, and bleeds like the real thing. The secret ingredient? Neuroscience.

These books will help you understand the trends you’re riding, what part of the business cycle you’re in, and what you’re up against.

Vegetarians and vegans pay heed: New research shows plants know when they’re being eaten. And they don’t like it.

That plants possess an intelligence is not new knowledge, but according to Modern Farmer, a new study from the University of Missouri shows plants can sense when they are being eaten and send out defense mechanisms to try to stop it from happening.

The study was carried out on thale cress, or Arabidopsis as it’s known scientifically, which is closely related to broccoli, kale, mustard greens, and other siblings of the brassica family and is popular for science experiments. It is commonly used in experiments because it was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, and scientists are intimately familiar with how it works.

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