Lifeboat Foundation

Not mentioned is that the roads become easier to replace instead of having to repave them.

The minister told a conference of transport authorities last week that the tenders for the “Positive Energy” initiative had already been issued and the tests on the panels would begin in the spring.

According to France’s Agency of Environment and Energy Management, 4m of solarised road is enough to supply one household’s electricity needs, apart from heating, and one kilometre will light a settlement with 5,000 inhabitants.

Continue reading “France to pave 1,000km of road with solar panels” »

An experiment by University of Washington researchers is setting the stage for advances in mind reading technology. Using brain implants and sophisticated software, researchers can now predict what their subjects are seeing with startling speed and accuracy.

The ability to view a two-dimensional image on a page or computer screen, and then transform that image into something our minds can immediately recognize, is a neurological process that remains mysterious to scientists. To learn more about how our brains perform this task—and to see if computers can collect and predict what a person is seeing in real time—a research team led by University of Washington neuroscientist Rajesh Rao and neurosurgeon Jeff Ojermann demonstrated that it’s possible to decode human brain signals at nearly the speed of perception. The details of their work can be found in a new paper in PLOS Computational Biology.

The team sought the assistance of seven patients undergoing treatment for epilepsy. Medications weren’t helping alleviate their seizures, so these patients were given temporary brain implants, and electrodes were used to pinpoint the focal points of their seizures. The UW researchers saw this as an opportunity to perform their experiment. “They were going to get the electrodes no matter what,” noted Ojermann in a UW NewsBeat article. “We were just giving them additional tasks to do during their hospital stay while they are otherwise just waiting around.”

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Illustration of a particle (red sphere) trapped by the 3D trapping node created by two superimposed, orthogonal (at right angles), standing surface acoustic waves and induced acoustic streaming (credit: Carnegie Mellon University)

A team of researchers at three universities has developed a way to use “acoustic tweezers” (which use ultrasonic surface acoustic waves, or SAWs, to trap and manipulate micrometer-scale particles and biological cells — see “Acoustic tweezers manipulate cellular-scale objects with ultrasound “) to non-invasively pick up and move single cells in three mutually orthogonal axes of motion (three dimensions).

The new 3D acoustic tweezers can pick up single cells or entire cell assemblies and deliver them to desired locations to create 2D and 3D cell patterns, or print the cells into complex shapes — a promising new method for “3D bioprinting” in biological tissues, the researchers say in an open-access paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Freedom!

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According to Nick Pfitzner, the Tesla Powerwall is “a thing of beauty.”

Pfitzner, who lives in Sydney’s Hills District, was one of the first homeowners in Australia to have the highly anticipated energy storage battery installed at his home on Thursday.

Tesla announced in September it would be bringing the Powerwall to Australia, with a spokesperson telling Mashable Australia the country had been “prioritised as a market” due to its high number of solar energy users.

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Researchers have successfully demonstrated how it is possible to interface graphene — a two-dimensional form of carbon — with neurons, or nerve cells, while maintaining the integrity of these vital cells. The work may be used to build graphene-based electrodes that can safely be implanted in the brain, offering promise for the restoration of sensory functions for amputee or paralysed patients, or for individuals with motor disorders such as epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

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Rob Joyce, Chief, Tailored Access Operations, National Security Agency.

From his role as the Chief of NSA’s Tailored Access Operation, home of the hackers at NSA, Mr. Joyce will talk about the security practices and capabilities that most effectively frustrate people seeking to exploit networks.

Continue reading “USENIX Enigma 2016 — NSA TAO Chief on Disrupting Nation State Hackers” »

Elon Musk wants to go to space within the next five years and thinks human beings can reach Mars by 2025.

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Humans have contributed, in the form of plastic, glass, and purified metals, the largest influx of new minerals into Earth’s geologic history (probably) since oxygen levels first ticked up in the atmosphere around 2.3 billion years ago.

Here’s two new, 100% real science words for you to learn today: Technofossil and plastiglomerate.

I’ll have a video out about this on Feb. 8… stay tuned!

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