Lifeboat Foundation

In Brief.

• Jamie Soar suffers from retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that has rendered him legally blind and which affects some 100,000 people in the U.S. alone.
• Because of the dual-screen projection method used in virtual reality, Soar was able to see normally for the first time in his life.

With the rise of specialized hardware such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Samsung Gear VR, virtual reality (VR) is at its most accessible point ever. It provides an immersive and realistic simulation of an environment, one which is created entirely through software and hardware. And notably, this environment can be experienced or controlled by the movements of your body. To this end, VR opens up an entirely new world (literally) of possibilities.

This pen copies the colors around you and lets you draw with them.

In Brief.

• New 3D printed bones are ‘hyperelastic,’ making them more malleable during procedures.
• 3D printers in hospitals could provide the hyperelastic bone ink, so surgeons could make implants in 24 hours.

Remarkable.

This best describes the new bone-mending technology developed at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois by Ramille Shah and her colleagues. They used ink made from a natural bone mineral called hydroxyapatite, mixed with PLGA, a mineral-binding polymer that makes the implants elastic.

Continue reading “Doctors Can Now 3D-Print Bones On Demand, Thanks to a New ‘Hyperelastic’ Material” »

(Phys.org)—Researchers have used the pressure of light—also called optical forces or sometimes “tractor beams”—to create a new type of rewritable, dynamic 3D holographic material. Unlike other 3D holographic materials, the new material can be rapidly written and erased many times, and can also store information without using any external energy. The new material has potential applications in 3D holographic displays, large-scale volumetric data storage devices, biosensors, tunable lasers, optical lenses, and metamaterials.

The research was conducted by a multidisciplinary team led by Yunuen Montelongo at Imperial College London and Ali K. Yetisen at Harvard University and MIT. In recent papers published in Nature Communications and Applied Physics Letters, the researchers demonstrated the reversible optical manipulation of nanostructured materials, which they used to fabricate active 3D holograms, lenses, and memory devices.

The key to creating the 3D holographic material with these advantages was to use optical forces to reversibly modify the material’s properties. The optical forces are produced by the interference of two or more laser beams, which creates an optical pressure capable of moving nanoscale structures. So far, optical forces have mainly been used for just one application: optical tweezers, which can hold and move tiny objects and are mostly used in biological applications.

Continue reading “Optical forces used to make rewritable 3D holographic materials” »

The United Nations (UN) has announced its first ever official space mission, with the aim of giving developing countries the opportunity to conduct research in a microgravity environment.

The mission, which is intended to launch in 2021, will make use of a Dream Chaser spacecraft – a shuttle-like spaceplane that’s currently in development by American aerospace firm Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).

The focus of the mission is to give developing nations – many of which don’t have their own dedicated space operations or craft – a chance to develop and fly payloads for an extended duration in orbit.

Continue reading “The United Nations just announced its first ever space mission” »

The only thing we know for sure is that everything will change.

Into programming? Now you can be *inside* programming.

Those rumors of Google giving WiFi routers another shot? They’re true. Meet Google WiFi, a router designed entirely in-house… and with a few nice advantages over the OnHub line. Apart from being much smaller (no vase-like design here), its big trick is its ability to create an Eero-style mesh network. You only have to add additional units to your network to improve coverage — there’s a Network Assistant app that makes it easy to add more routers and improve your signal.

Companion software also lets you control the devices linked to the router, such as enabling or disabling their connections. You’ll have to wait until December to get Google WiFi (pre-orders start in November), but the pricing at least hits the sweet spot. Routers cost $129 each, and you can get a three-pack for $299 if you need to blanket your home.

Continue reading “Google WiFi is a router that simplifies whole-home wireless” »

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