Lifeboat Foundation

Green energy company Fortescue Future Industries (FFI) is collaborating with MMA Offshore to convert a 75-meter (246-feet) vessel, the “MMA Leveque”, so that it can run almost entirely on green ammonia by 2022, a press statement from FFI explains.

In the same statement, the company reveals that its chairman, billionaire Andrew Forrest, called for an industry-wide push for shipping to reach net-zero by 2040 during a keynote for ‘Transport Day’ at the COP26 conference in Glasgow this week, a United Nations summit aimed at accelerating action on climate change.

The MMA Leveque is one of several Fortescue Metal Group’s vessels and vehicles that will be transformed to operate on green fuels, as the company also says it is gradually working on converting its fleet of trucks, locomotives, and ships. Earlier this year, FFI successfully demonstrated the combustion of a blended ammonia fuel in a locomotive, and it says it will soon be able to power trains on one hundred percent green ammonia.

A new treatment successfully restored the ability to walk in a group of lab mice with spinal cord injuries! And it took only four weeks.

Virtual and augmented reality headsets are designed to place wearers directly into other environments, worlds, and experiences. While the technology is already popular among consumers for its immersive quality, there could be a future where the holographic displays look even more like real life. In their own pursuit of these better displays, the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab has combined their expertise in optics and artificial intelligence. Their most recent advances in this area are detailed in a paper published today (November 12, 2021) in Science Advances and work that will be presented at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2021 in December.

At its core, this research confronts the fact that current augmented and virtual reality displays only show 2D images to each of the viewer’s eyes, instead of 3D – or holographic – images like we see in the real world.

“They are not perceptually realistic,” explained Gordon Wetzstein, associate professor of electrical engineering and leader of the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab. Wetzstein and his colleagues are working to come up with solutions to bridge this gap between simulation and reality while creating displays that are more visually appealing and easier on the eyes.

In the race toward practical fusion energy, tokamaks (donut-shaped plasma devices) are the leading concept—they have achieved better confinement and higher plasma temperatures than any other configuration. Two major magnetic fields are used to contain the plasma: a toroidal field (along the axes of the donut) produced by external coils and the field from a ring current flowing in the plasma itself. The performance of a tokamak, however, comes with an Achilles heel—the possibility of disruptions, a sudden termination of the plasma driven by instabilities in the plasma current. Since the plasma current provides the equilibrium and confinement for the tokamak, the challenge of taming disruptions must be addressed and solved.

As the magnitudes of the plasma current and plasma energy increase, disruptions can cause more damage. As such, they are a particularly important concern for the newest and most powerful machines, such as the SPARC tokamak. SPARC is a compact, high-magnetic–field tokamak under design and in the early stages of construction by a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. The SPARC plasma is predicted to produce more than 10 times the power than is required to maintain its 250 million F temperatures. All tokamaks of this performance class must develop strategies to protect the machine against disruptions.

A solution, however, may be in hand. Prompted by a theoretical idea from Prof. Allen Boozer of Columbia University, the SPARC design includes an innovative new coil structure which promises fully passive protection from the threat of runaway electrons.

A new report from CB Insights has revealed that global funding in AI startups has seen a surge of 8% to $17.9 billion during Q3 2021.

Varjo’s XR-3 headset has perhaps the best passthrough view of any MR headset on the market thanks to color cameras that offer a fairly high resolution and a wide field-of-view. But rather than just using the passthrough view for AR (bringing virtual objects into the real world) Varjo has developed a new tool to do the reverse (bringing real objects into the virtual world).

At AWE 2021 this week I got my first glimpse at ‘Varjo Lab Tools’, a soon-to-be released software suite that will work with the company’s XR-3 mixed reality headset. The tool allows users to trace arbitrary shapes that then become windows into the real world, while the rest of the view remains virtual.

A new study examines Kamo‘oalewa, one of Earth’s quasi-satellites that may have been ejected from the Moon in a collision that flung it out of our system.

The first ever simulation of baryons on a quantum computer is reported by the University of Waterloo.

Researchers in Japan say they have started a clinical trial of ovarian cancer treatment involving immune cells created from induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells.

The team of researchers from the National Cancer Center Hospital East and Kyoto University’s Center for iPS Cell Research and Application made the announcement in an online news conference on Thursday.

The iPS cells used in the treatment are capable of developing into any kind of cell. A gene that reacts strongly to a protein unique to a certain type of ovarian cancer is inserted into iPS cells to create natural killer cells. These NK cells will then be injected into the ovaries of patients with this type of ovarian cancer.