Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The Space Development Agency is looking to acquire as many as 10 satellites to host military payloads for experiments in low Earth orbit.

This new procurement of satellites – known as the NExT experimental testbed – replaces a previous SDA program called T1DES announced last fall.

The T1DES procurement was for 18 satellites hosting industry-developed experimental payloads. The plan was to integrate them with the agency’s 126-satellite broadband constellation known as the Transport Layer Tranche 1 projected to launch in 2024. Under the new plan, SDA will move forward with the deployment of the Transport Layer and will select a separate contractor to produce 10 satellites that will host government-developed payloads for technology experiments.

ESA’s Comet Interceptor mission to visit a pristine comet or other interstellar object just starting its journey into the inner solar system has been “adopted” this week; the study phase is complete and, following selection of the spacecraft prime contractor, work will soon begin to build the mission.

Comet Interceptor will share a ride into space with ESA’s Ariel exoplanet mission in 2029. The mission will build upon the successes of Rosetta and Giotto, ESA missions that both visited “short-period” comets. Though these missions completely transformed our understanding of comets, their targets had already swung around the sun many times and had therefore changed significantly since their creation.

Comet Interceptor aims to scrutinize a comet that has spent little time in the inner solar system, or is possibly visiting it for the first time. Whilst Rosetta’s target hailed from the rocky Kuiper Belt just beyond Neptune, Comet Interceptor’s could originate from the vast Oort Cloud, more than a thousand times further from the sun.

David Sinclair shares another side of himself. Compassion for all people. He wants to make sure that longevity technologies are available for all people, not just for the super wealthy and their pets. He also speaks of emerging elderly populations who can live well up until death rather than suffering for so long, and instead start new careers and hobbies.

Researchers have restored vision in animal by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. The work, by Dr David Sinclair Lab, published in Nature Dec 2020, suggests a new approach to reversing age-related decline, by reprogramming some cells to a ‘younger’ state in which they are better able to repair or replace damaged tissue.

Continue reading “Boost NAD, Reprogramme Our Cells to be Young Again | Dr David Sinclair Interview Clips” »

Ricoh, European startups race to bring flexible power source to market this year.

TOKYO — A thin, flexible alternative to silicon-based solar cells is set to be produced in greater volumes, opening up more uses for renewable energy such as powering indoor smart devices.

Organic solar cells are made by printing photovoltaic material on plastic sheets and other bendable substrates. They are expected to cost half as much to make as silicon-based solar cells and are 100 times lighter, manufacturers say.

Continue reading “Solar power anywhere: Lightweight organic cells aim beyond rooftops” »

The old adage that oil and water don’t mix isn’t entirely accurate. While it’s true that the two compounds don’t naturally combine, turning them into one final product can be done. You just need an emulsifier, an ingredient commonly used in the food industry.

Yangchao Luo, an associate professor in UConn’s College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources, is using an innovative emulsification process for the development of a healthier shelf-stable fat for food manufacturing.

Luo is working with something known as high internal phase Pickering emulsions (HIPEs). High internal phase means the mixture is at least 75% oil. Pickering emulsions are those that are stabilized by solid particles.

Moving beyond I2C, Renesas is introducing a new I3C intelligent switch family to boost performance and speed in the data center.

Few fields are as dynamic and fast-evolving as the data center. With new software, use-cases, and applications popping up every year, the underlying hardware has become increasingly difficult to keep up with.

One relatively new technology designed to improve upon legacy hardware is I3C, the successor to conventional I2C. Boasting improvements on I2C, I3C has still yet to become widespread in the data center, a place where its value could be significant.

3D printing can deliver massive savings in time taken to build the house exteriors, shaving off weeks from the process.

The origin of consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of science. One proposed solution, first suggested by Nobel Laureate and Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hammeroff, at Arizona State University, in Tucson, attributes consciousness to quantum computations in the brain. This in turn hinges on the notion that gravity could play a role in how quantum effects disappear, or “collapse.” But a series of experiments in a lab deep under the Gran Sasso mountains, in Italy, has failed to find evidence in support of a gravity-related quantum collapse model, undermining the feasibility of this explanation for consciousness. The result is reported in the journal Physics of Life Reviews.

“How consciousness arises in the brain is a huge puzzle,” says Catalina Curceanu, a member of the physics think tank, the Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi, and the lead physicist on the experiments at INFN in Frascati, Italy. “There are many competing ideas, but very few can be experimentally tested.”

Quantum physics famously tells us that cats can be alive and dead at the same time, at least in theory. Yet in practice we never see felines locked in such an unfortunate limbo state. One popular explanation for why not is because the “wavefunction” of a system–its quantum character allowing it to be in two contradictory states simultaneously–is more likely to “collapse” or be destroyed if it is more massive, leaving it in one defined state, either dead or alive, say, but not both at the same time. This model of collapse, related to gravity acting on heavy objects like cats, was invoked by Penrose and Hammeroff when developing their model of consciousness, ‘Orch OR theory’ (the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory), in the 1990s.

Starship launches finally approved by FAA!

The FAA is expected to release the result of the Starbase environmental assessment for orbital Starship launches at 2 pm Eastern, per Joey Roulette. We will provide live analysis and reaction to the outcome.