Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 7,650

A test firing of Europe’s Helicon Plasma Thruster, developed with ESA by SENER and the Universidad Carlos III’s Plasma & Space Propulsion Team (EP2-UC3M) in Spain. This compact, electrodeless and low voltage design is ideal for the propulsion of small satellites, including maintaining the formation of large orbital constellations.

While traditional chemical have fundamental upper limits, electric propulsion pumps extra energy into the thrust reaction to reach much higher propellant velocities by accelerating propellant using . There are many methods of electric propulsion, many of which require electrodes to apply a current, increasing thruster cost and complexity.

By contrast the Helicon Plasma Thruster uses high power radio frequency waves to excite the propellant into a plasma.

Read more | >

The Orion is a sub-orbital electric aircraft equipped with an air-breathing magneto-plasma jet propulsion engine that could go from the tarmac to an altitude of 24000 metres and cruise at about 800 km/h.

It would bring passengers to the edge of black space with stunning views from its ultra-wide panoramic windows. Its new plasma pulse detonation engine could become the standard of this nascent industry.

It’s obvious that sub-orbital jets will become in demand as Earth’s population and wealth continues to rise. There’s already a lot of demand for jets capable of reaching this kind of altitude, but one major barrier has been the engine’s performance and overall costs. The Orion concept is all about introducing a new type of propulsion (plasma jet) and seeing how it could benefit various industries.

Read more | >

The European Food Safety Authority has taken in more than 156 innovative food applications for substances such as apple cell cultures and mung bean proteins since January 2018, when new EU legislation took effect, aiming to make it easier for businesses to bring their unusual products to market. Of those 156114 are still under consideration, 39 were approved and three were rejected, officials said.

More products have been submitted for approval since 2018 than in prior 14 years combined.

Read more | >

MIT anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas reflects on the deep connection between planetary and human well-being.

When anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas first went to Belize to begin ethnographic research in 2008, she planned to chronicle human health concerns, focusing on diabetes. Then she learned that local diets contributing to such chronic conditions were changing, in part due to losses in ocean food webs, and kept hearing stories about how local plants were in trouble.

“Listening and trying to learn from what people were saying, over the years I came to see human health and planetary health as deeply interconnected,” says Moran-Thomas, the Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. “When I think of health now, I think of disarray in bigger ecosystems and infrastructures that’s also landing in human bodies.”

Read more | >

Summary: People with spinal cord injuries have the same brain activity during processing speed tasks as healthy older adults. The findings suggest the theory of accelerated cognitive aging following SCI is correct.

Source: Kessler Foundation.

A team of rehabilitation researchers has studied processing speed deficits in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), comparing their brain activation patterns with those of healthy age-matched controls, and older healthy individuals. They found that the SCI group and older controls had similar activation patterns, but the SCI group differed significantly from their age-matched controls.

Read more | >

The next big event on the tech show calendar is almost upon us. The CES 2021 kicks off on Monday, 11th January and runs for four days. Last year it was held just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic wave, so ended up being one of the last physical exhibitions covered by the tech press. This year it will be somewhat reduced and virtual only. However the organisers, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), have already been booking venues for 2022 having faith in the various vaccines being able to provide enough personal safety for a hybrid event.

In 2020 the CES show attracted 171268 attendees, including 6517 members of the media, to promotional venues stuffed by 4400 exhibitors. In 2021 expect these numbers to be scaled down. We do have important keynotes and presentations from the likes of AMD, Nvidia, and Samsung to look forward to but the online-only event will feature a relatively small 1000 exhibitors. Being online will open up ‘attendance’ more widely though, with almost the same number of fold expected to take part in the show this year as last (estimated to be 150000 visitors in 2021).

Read more | >

Nearly 75 years after the puzzling first detection of the kaon, scientists are still looking to the particle for hints of physics beyond their current understanding.

Extremely massive fundamental particles could exist, but they would seriously mess with our understanding of quantum mechanics.

Read more | >

O,.o kaons in action for interstellar travel: D.

Interstellar probes and future interstellar travel will require relativistic rockets. The problem is that such a rocket drive requires that the rocket exhaust velocity from the fuel also is relativistic, since otherwise the rocket thrust is much too small: the total mass of the fuel will be so large that relativistic speeds cannot be reached in a reasonable time and the total mass of the rocket will be extremely large. Until now, no technology was known that would be able to give rocket exhaust at relativistic speed and a high enough momentum for relativistic travel. Here, a useful method for relativistic interstellar propulsion is described for the first time. This method gives exhaust at relativistic speeds and is a factor of at least one hundred better than normal fusion due to its increased energy output from the annihilation-like meson formation processes. It uses ordinary hydrogen as fuel so a return travel is possible after refuelling almost anywhere in space. The central nuclear processes have been studied in around 20 publications, which is considered to be sufficient evidence for the general properties. The nuclear processes give relativistic particles (kaons, pions and muons) by laser-induced annihilation-like processes in ultra-dense hydrogen H. The kinetic energy of the mesons is 1300 times larger than the energy of the laser pulse. This method is superior to the laser-sail method by several orders of magnitude and is suitable for large spaceships.

Read more | >