Lifeboat Foundation

The trouble with microphones is that they don’t just hear — they have to listen. Powering the mic and its signal processor means using energy, and energy means a battery, and a battery means charging. This new microphone-like system hears more like the way our own ears do, requiring little or no power, and could help fill the world with voice-responsive machines. (If that’s something we really want.)

The device is called a “triboelectric auditory sensor,” and it works via what’s called the triboelectric effect — essentially when two surfaces rub together and create a charge. They’re still trying to figure out why this happens, but what matters to engineers is that it happens reliably.

Triboelectric nanogenerators have been around for a few years, creating power by having two compatible materials interact with each other at super-small scales. While they’re tiny and highly efficient, they don’t actually produce a lot of power. Researchers from Chongqing University found that, fortunately, you don’t need a lot of power for the purposes of detecting sound.

Continue reading “Nanotech powers this super-sensitive microphone” »

And while we’re at it, why don’t the other planets in our solar system seem to twinkle?

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Two new permanent exhibits just opened at the Maryland Science Center, capturing the imagination of children of all ages.

The two new exhibits are titled “Science Aglow” and “Water Play.”

Science Aglow is an exhibit on the Electromagnetic Spectrum. It was developed and built in-house, involving topics of light, radiation, energy and optics. Kids can capture their shadow, use infrared cameras, experiment with light sensors, and observe how different animals view light.

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That may be about to change. Behind the scenes, big tech companies are funding secret projects to develop robots. Amazon.com Inc. has been working on a robot version of its Echo voice-activated speaker for a while now and this year began throwing more money and people at the effort. Alphabet Inc. is also working on robots, and smartphone maker Huawei Technologies Inc. is building a model for the Chinese market that will teach kids to speak English.

Alphabet and Huawei join Amazon in the race to build androids, the first of which could debut by 2020.

The holographic display of the future is here and you can have one on your desk for under $600.

Ever since I saw Princess Leia appealing to Obi Wan that he was her only hope when I was 11, I’ve wanted a holographic display. Movies like Minority Report and Back to the Future II (do you remember the shark hologram that ate Marty?) have consumed thousands of people’s lives over the past few decades. But until now, no one has been able to make a scalable device that would let groups of people, unaided by a VR or AR headset, see and touch a living and moving 3D world.

That’s changing today with the launch of the Looking Glass, a new type of interface that achieves that dream of the hologram we’ve been promised for so long. The Looking Glass is technically a lightfield and volumetric display hybrid, but that’s pretty nerdy-sounding. I like to just call it a holographic display.

Continue reading “The Holographic Display Of The Future Is Here” »

If the cosmos is a simulation then does DMT provide us with a method to explore beyond the simulation? Is DMT the code that releases the human mind from the cosmic simulation?

Ed. Note: The following article below was originally published on The Transhuman Party. It’s been re-published here with permission from the author.

Is DMT the chemical code that allows us to exit the Cosmic Simulation?

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A quickly closed loophole has proven that the “great smoky dragon” of quantum mechanics may forever elude capture.

Orbiting radar instrument finds Martian analog to lake under Antarctic glaciers.

Brain Injuries And Shoulder-Launched Assault Weapons : Shots — Health News The military is trying to figure out whether troops can sustain brain injuries from firing certain powerful weapons. A pair of Marines who used to shoot these weapons think they already know.