Lifeboat Foundation

Near-field wireless power transfer is already used in some applications, such as charging pads for smartphones. However, longer-range transfer of energy has the potential to radically improve our home, office, and other indoor environments, by completely untethering devices from cables and reducing or eliminating the need for batteries.

French company ARCHOS has announced a partnership with U.S. company Ossia Inc, to integrate a wireless power system into consumer products next year.

Over the past few years, scientists have been trying to understand how listening to music affects your brain. One of the features of music that seems to be important is whether you have an emotional connection to it. In other words, listening to a favorite tune will have a different effect on your brain than an unknown or disliked piece of music.

Now, a new study has shown that people with Alzheimer’s Disease can improve their cognition by listening to music that has personal meaning to them, such as songs they’ve been listening to for years.

Researchers Corinne Fischer, Nathan Churchill and colleagues from the University of Toronto ran a small study to find out what exactly happens when people with Alzheimer’s listened to their favorite songs. They asked fourteen people with early stage Alzheimer’s Disease to spend one hour per day listening to music they enjoyed and were very familiar with. Before and after the test period all participants also took a cognitive test, and had their brain activity measured by functional MRI (fMRI).

Welcome to a world with electric skies.

Rolls-Royce claims that its all-electric aircraft, called “Spirit of Innovation”, reached a top speed of 387.4 mph (623km/h), making it the fastest electric vehicle in the world, a press statement reveals.

Continue reading “Rolls-Royce’s Electric ‘Spirit of Innovation’ Reached a World Record 387.4 MPH” »

Get ready for the ‘White Bat’.

What’s the best way to counter gossip? Coming out with the truth. That seems to be the idea behind a new video released by the U.S. Air Force’s Profession of Arms Center of Excellence (PACE).

Continue reading “Is the US Air Force About to Unveil Some New Spy Drones?” »

But it might not be a success, warns Elon Musk.

SpaceX’s launch vehicle scheduled to take humans back to the Moon is expected to make its first orbital flight as early as January 2022.

Speaking in a video call at the fall meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, CEO Elon Musk said that SpaceX is scheduled to carry out some tests in December, ahead of Starship’s first orbital flight in January, Business Insider reported.

Continue reading “SpaceX’s Starship Will Fly Into Orbit For the First Time in January 2022” »

The team has set an internal deadline of 2025.

In a move that could peg it against electric vehicle market leader, Tesla, Apple has begun working aggressively on its fully autonomous electric car, Bloomberg reported. Developing a car has been on Apple’s agenda since 2014 but recent moves within the company signal a push towards making an Apple car a reality.

Given Apple’s history of taking regularly used products and transforming them into their must-have versions using excellent design, it is hardly a surprise. With Steve Jobs at the helm of affairs, Apple made the iPod even when music players were ubiquitous. Then the company revealed the iPhone when Nokia was still selling resistive touch screens as its premium product. And recently, the Apple Watch has become the “it” wearable even though there are other smartwatch options in the market. During a time where electric vehicles are in a surge, it only seems natural that the electric car is Apple’s next target.

By using ‘the holy grail of low drag.’

Business travel is going egg-shaped. Otto Aviation’s Celera 500L was just put through its paces with its first flight tests, a press statement reveals. The aircraft was designed as a business aircraft that is much cheaper to run than today’s options.

To achieve this ambitious goal, the Celera employs an egg-like design that achieves laminar flow — the uninterrupted flow of air — when in flight, vastly reducing drag by allowing air to flow smoothly over the aircraft’s surface.

Glaucoma is a surprisingly common condition that can have serious consequences if it goes untreated. Understanding the importance of early detection, a team of engineers and ophthalmologists in Australia has developed a novel approach using AI to diagnose glaucoma that can yield results in just 10 s.

Have you ever experimented with food dye? It can make cooking a lot more fun, and provides a great example of how two fluids can mix together well—or not much at all.

Add a small droplet in water and you might see it slowly dissolve in the larger liquid. Add a few more drops and perhaps you’ll see a wave of color spread, the colored droplets spreading and breaking apart to diffuse more thoroughly. Add a spoon and begin stirring quickly, and you’ll probably find that the water fully changes color, as desired.

Continue reading “New AI Test Diagnoses Glaucoma in Just 10 Seconds” »

Have you ever experimented with food dye? It can make cooking a lot more fun, and provides a great example of how two fluids can mix together well—or not much at all.

Add a small droplet in water and you might see it slowly dissolve in the larger liquid. Add a few more drops and perhaps you’ll see a wave of color spread, the colored droplets spreading and breaking apart to diffuse more thoroughly. Add a spoon and begin stirring quickly, and you’ll probably find that the water fully changes color, as desired.

Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, led by Ivan Bermejo-Moreno, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, studied a similar phenomenon with gases at high speeds, with an eye toward more efficient mixing to support supersonic scramjet engines. In the study, published in Physics of Fluids, USC Viterbi Ph.D. Jonas Buchmeier, along with Xiangyu Gao (USC Viterbi Ph.D. ‘20) and former visiting M.Sc. student Alexander Bußmann (Technical University Munich), developed a novel tracking method that zoomed in on the fundamentals of how mixing happens. The study helps understand, for example, how injected fuel interacts with the surrounding oxidizers (air) in the engine to make it operate optimally, or how interstellar gases mix after a supernova explosion to form new stars. The method focuses on the geometric and physical properties of the turbulent swirling motions of gases and how they change shape over time as they mix.