Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists in Iceland have figured out how to create geothermal energy from super-hot molten rock.

India’s largest commercial oil company, Indian Oil Corporation Ltd., will partner with Lod-based energy start-up Phinergy to develop and produce innovative metal-air batteries, often regarded as the solution for long-distance electric-vehicle travel.

Indian Oil said it had bought a minority stake in Phinergy on Tuesday, which specializes in aluminum-air (Al-air) and zinc-air technologies. Unlike conventional lithium-ion batteries that carry oxygen within a heavy electrode, metal-air systems produce energy by combining aluminum, water and oxygen from the air.

The future incorporation of the long-pursued battery solution into electric vehicles, Phinergy said, will enable long-range driving, five-minute energy recharges and lowering the cost of electric vehicles.

Continue reading “Indian oil giant, Israeli start-up to develop metal-air batteries” »

Researchers have created a unique device which will unlock the elusive terahertz wavelengths and make revolutionary new technologies possible.

Terahertz waves (THz) sit between microwaves and infrared in the light frequency spectrum, but due to their low-energy scientists have been unable to harness their potential.

The conundrum is known in scientific circles as the terahertz gap.

An international group of researchers has made graphene more affordably and with a lower environmental impact than current chemical methods by using bacteria.

Graphene is a very strong and conductive material that could revolutionize electronics and engineering. However, producing graphene in large quantities requires lots of energy and involves toxic chemicals, such as hydrazine, which damages the nervous system.

Researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the University of Rochester in the US have worked to overcome these problems by using bacteria to produce graphene. Their work has been published in the journal ChemOpen.

Essentially you could at this point make a working protoss carrier o.o

Carriers are a late-game Protoss air unit that are the largest and most costly unit available for Protoss. Carriers are produced from the Stargate and requires a pre-existing Fleet Beacon. Carriers have the highest armor, health, and shields of the Protoss race. Their main advantages are their long range and mobility in combat; this potentially incredibly long range is especially notable as unique among Protoss units. On the other hand, their raw attack power is rather low for their price. Perhaps their greatest use is in extreme late-game where their supply efficiency for their staying power is usable, much like Battlecruisers; however, they are hard-countered by the latter since they make volleys of low-damage attacks and due to the Yamato Gun.

Carriers themselves do not, in fact, possess any attack, but like Reavers build and transport unique units –Interceptors in this case- to much the same effect. A Carrier does not come equipped with any Interceptors when first warped in, so it must construct them individually, adding quite a deal of cost and build time to the finished unit. Unlike the Reaver’s Scarabs, however, the units it builds do not immediately sacrifice themselves to attack but attack as would another unit stacking up on a target that it “fires” at until recalled at which point they may still be used again. While targetable, expensive and fairly weak individually Interceptors move quickly around targets, potentially out of range, and can recharge shields instantly upon being recalled meaning they can overwhelm targeted forces (although potentially very, very slowly). Interceptors are all destroyed if the Carrier itself is destroyed.

As the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he’s also become one of Capitol Hill’s most vocal advocates urging the country to take foreign technology threats seriously, both the possibility of kinetic real-world cyberattacks (such as disabling power plants or water systems) and already-underway information influence operations like the ones that upended the 2016 presidential election, as well as the looming challenges next-generation technologies pose to national security.

A former telecoms entrepreneur, the Virginia senator says that saving the industry (and democracy) might mean blowing up Big Tech as we know it.

Public-safety drone consultancy Skyfire Consulting has announced a partnership with UAV company Doosan Mobility Innovation and hydrogen-fuel service provider ReadyH2 to tackle a pipeline-inspection project for an unnamed American company.

Doosan will deploy a hydrogen-powered octocopter. The drone sports a hydrogen-powered generator fueling two hours of flight time per mission over nearly 50 miles.

Continue reading “Hydrogen-fueled Drones Will Inspect U.S. Gas Pipeline” »

The Airbus-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft has been closed up inside the payload fairing of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket in preparation for liftoff from Cape Canaveral in February on a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA.

Technicians inside the Astrotech payload processing facility encapsulated the Solar Orbiter spacecraft — designed with thermal shielding to protect against the heat of the sun — inside the Atlas 5’s payload fairing Jan. 20. The spacecraft inside the Atlas 5 rocket’s 4-meter-diameter (13.1-foot) aerodynamic nose shroud will soon travel to ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility, where crane will hoist the payload package atop the launcher.

Valued at nearly $1.7 billion, the Solar Orbiter mission will travel closer to the sun than Mercury, where it will join NASA’s Parker Solar Probe for tandem observations of the solar wind and giant solar eruptions that can affect communications and electrical grids on Earth, plus satellite operations.

WASHINGTON — DirecTV is racing to move its Spaceway-1 satellite out of the geostationary arc after the 15-year-old satellite suffered a crippling battery malfunction that the company fears could cause it to explode.

DirecTV told the U.S. Federal Communications Commission that it does not have time to deplete the remaining fuel on Spaceway-1 before disposing of it by boosting it 300 kilometers above the geostationary arc, a region home to most of the world’s large communications satellites.

Spaceway-1 is a Boeing-built High Power 702 model satellite that was designed to last 12 years. Launched in 2005 on a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket, the 6,080-kilogram satellite originally provided high-definition television direct broadcasting services from its orbital slot at 102.8 degrees west longitude. More recently, Spaceway-1 was being used to backup Ka-band capacity over Alaska.