Lifeboat Foundation

Who hasn’t dreamt of escaping to the stars? Especially now, with most of us confined to limited spaces and steeped in tragic news.

NASA and the ISS National Lab are ready to help. They’ve developed a range of adventurous programs and activities for all the children stuck in home lockdown, including a training program to become a home astronaut, build a hovercraft, launch rockets, and many more.

Hold the farts in?

Doctors have made the foul discovery that farting could spread the Covid-19 disease – unless infected people wear pants which can protect this from happening.

Silicon-germanium alloy glows, may be future CPU optical communication laser.

O,.o circa 2017.

Astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey used the most luminous objects in the universe — quasars — to create their new 3D map of space.

Circa 2011 essentially a magnet could be a battery and cpu and a gpu with magnonics.

Harvard physicists have expanded the possibilities for quantum engineering of novel materials such as high-temperature superconductors by coaxing ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice — a light crystal — to self-organize into a magnet, using only the minute disturbances resulting from quantum mechanics. The research, published in the journal Nature, is the first demonstration of such a “quantum magnet” in an optical lattice.

As modern technology depends more and more on materials with exotic quantum mechanical properties, researchers are coming up against a natural barrier.

Continue reading “The ‘quantum magnet’” »

Tesla’s extreme Australian makeover continues with a new “virtual power plant,” part of the continent’s overall program to encourage these collections of renewable resources. Tesla is just the first to make and report on a virtual power plant for the program.

Like the large energy storage facility Tesla operates in South Australia, the goal of the virtual power plant is to both collect energy and store it to be fed back into the grid. The pilot virtual plant is distributed across the rooftops of 1,000 low-income homes in South Australia, and Tesla says its goal is to eventually have 50,000 solar rooftops there. That number might sound small, but South Australia only has about 1.6 million residents.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, spoke with NPR on Thursday, saying that his agency is working on a plan to safely reopen the United States. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images hide caption.

Anti-mortar system specs, legal paperwork, payment forms, and more, dumped online from infected PCs.

Two NASA astronauts said Friday they expect it will be tough returning to such a drastically changed world next week, after more than half a year at the International Space Station.

Andrew Morgan said the crew has tried to keep atop the pandemic news. But it’s hard to comprehend what’s really going on and what to expect, he noted, when his nine-month mission ends next Friday.

“It is quite surreal for us to see this whole situation unfolding on the planet below,” said Jessica Meir, who took part in the first all-female spacewalk last fall. “We can tell you that the Earth still looks just as stunning as always from up here, so it’s difficult to believe all the changes that have taken place since both of us have been up here.”