Lifeboat Foundation

Under a draft proposal, patients would be able to buy some therapies without regulatory approval.

Razer is building a toaster. Mattel is probably building an exascale supercomputer. I hear Raytheon just got into baby toys. Dogs and cats, living together! Chaos reigns.

The most powerful laser ever made has one-tenth the power of the sun and is being used in cancer therapy research. P.S. It works.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ALwgeCGvlw

Mobile World Congress this past February included the unveiling of several notable smartphones like the Nokia 9 PureView and LG G8. However, one device got an inordinate amount of attention — the Energizer Power Max P18K Pop. Hiding behind that clunky name was a phone with a gigantic 18,000 mAh battery. This brick of a phone ended up on Indiegogo, and despite all the hype, it flopped. Hard. Of the anticipated $1.2 million, the phone only pulled in pre-orders worth $15,005 — just 1 percent of the required funding.

The Energizer Power Max P18K Pop is not actually a product of the battery manufacturer. The Energizer name is merely licensed by Avenir Telecom, a French manufacturer of phones, cables, and other accessories. It has produced other Energizer phones in the past, but none of them sparked the same combination of fascination and amusement.

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Designed to mimic the human nervous system.

via APP.

At last, it’s done. The biggest spaceship size chart ever created is now complete and fully operational. 4,268 × 5,690 pixels of technological terror that includes everything from the smaller Star War ships to EVE. According to its author, Dirk Loechel, this is the last update. It’s epic.

The last update

For real this time: This is the final major content update, though if there are issues I’ll still fix them. I also haven’t forgotten I wanted to vectorize the writing. It’s still on the radar. But content-wise, I think that is about all I can put in.

Continue reading “The biggest comparison of sci-fi spaceships ever is complete at last” »

Twenty years ago, a cryptographic puzzle was included in the construction of a building on the MIT campus. The structure that houses what is now MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) includes a time capsule designed by the building’s architect, [Frank Gehry]. It contains artifacts related to the history of computing, and was meant to be opened whenever someone solved a cryptographic puzzle, or after 35 years had elapsed.

The puzzle was not expected to be solved early, but [Bernard Fabrot], a developer in Belgium, has managed it using not a supercomputer but a run-of-the-mill Intel i7 processor. The capsule will be opened later in May.

The famous cryptographer, [Ronald Rivest], put together what we now know is a deceptively simple challenge. It involves a successive squaring operation, and since it is inherently sequential there is no possibility of using parallel computing techniques to take any shortcuts. [Fabrot] used the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic Library in his code, and took over 3 years of computing time to solve it. Meanwhile another team is using an FPGA and are expecting a solution in months, though have been pipped to the post by the Belgian.

Continue reading “MIT Cryptographers Are No Match For A Determined Belgian” »

Fixed-wing planes and helicopters are no longer the darling of the RC world. Even quadcopters and other multirotors are starting to look old hat, as the community looks to ever more outrageous designs. [rctestflight] has slimmed things down to the extreme with this coaxial bicopter build, also known as the Flying Stick (Youtube video, embedded below).

The initial design consists of two brushless outrunner motors fitted with props, rotating in opposite directions to cancel out their respective torques. Each is mounted on a gimbal, setup to provide control authority. iNav is used as a flight controller, chosen due to its versatile motor mixing settings. The craft was built to test its ability at recovery from freefall, as a follow-on from earlier attempts at building a brushless “rocket” craft.

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