Lifeboat Foundation

It’s an unfortunate fact that a large percentage of people have some sort of trouble with their vision. Even if you don’t at the moment, every human eventually has enough trouble focusing both near and far that they’ll need glasses for one or the other as they age. Our pupils become more limited also, with young eyes able to expand and close from about 2mm to 8mm, while in seniors they hardly change size at all. Exposure to the wrong kinds of light can also lead to eye issues later in life.

Fortunately, there are a variety of high-tech solutions either available or planned that can help us delay, or workaround, or even prevent some of these problems. For many of us, the only time we think about getting new glasses or a different kind of contact lenses is when our prescription changes. But that old pair of glasses you’re wearing doesn’t include the latest high-tech advances, which might turn out to be important to you. Similarly, there is increasing competition in contact lenses as well. We’ll cover some of the most important advances below.

Continue reading “High-Tech Vision Care: Is It Time to Upgrade Your Glasses or Contacts?” »

Watch Are We Getting Closer to Thorium Nuclear Fuel?, an Earth video from Seeker.

Increased attacks prove the importance of detecting threat behaviors early and monitoring network traffic, stopping cybercriminals in their tracks.

Contact successful!

Diwata-2 was successfully launched to space on October 29, 2018 at 12:08 GMT+08 from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan via H-IIA F40 rocket. It is one of the small satellites piggybacked with the main payloads IBUKI-2, also known as GOSAT-2 (JAXA’s Second Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite), and KhalifaSat, a remote sensing Earth observation satellite developed by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in the United Arab Emirates. The other small satellites are the Japanese-made Tenkou, PROITERES-2, Stars-AO, and AUTcube-2. Diwata-2 was inserted into the Sun-Synchronous Orbit at an altitude of 621 km, 43 minutes and 20 seconds after rocket lift-off.

On Oct 29, 2018 at 13:52 GMT+08, initial contact was established between Diwata-2 and the Ground Receiving Station (GRS) located at the Department of Science and Technology Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI). Short telemetry data was received from the satellite on that day. Diwata-2 was initially tracked using pre-launch orbital parameters. As of 12:40 PM yesterday, October 31, 2018, the GRS can now read the satellite’s status, including vital signs such as fully charged batteries, normal power consumption, and good communication link. Commands were successfully sent and initial check procedures will continue throughout the first week from launch. Initial image captures from the cameras can be expected in the coming days.

Continue reading “Diwata-2 successfully launched to space, makes first contact” »

Promising NASA research could make Mars missions far more realistic.

This technology will one day allow humans to live and work on Mars—and return to Earth to tell the story.

After a gyroscope failure put the Hubble Space Telescope out of action on October 5, NASA engineers finally see an end to its troubles. They have its backup gyroscope operating within a normal range and expect science operations to resume imminently.

The space telescope entered a low-power safe mode in early October, suspending science operations while engineers here on Earth diagnosed, then attempted to fix the problem.

At maximum efficiency, Hubble uses three gyroscopes for orienting itself to observe a target in the sky. These gyros measure the speed at which the telescope turns, so that it can be aimed accurately.

Continue reading “NASA Engineers Basically Jiggled The Hubble Telescope to Fix Its Recent Problem” »

Human neurons are much larger than those of model organisms mice and rats, so it’s been unclear whether it’s size that makes a difference in our brain’s computational power. Now, in a study appearing October 18 in the journal Cell, researchers show that unlike those of other animals, human neurons employ highly compartmentalized signaling. Human dendrites—the tree-like branching structures that function as neurons’ antennas—process electrical signals differently than dendrites in rodents, the most common model systems for studying neuronal properties.

“The human neuron is basically like a rat neuron, but because it’s so much longer, signals have much farther to travel. The human dendrites thus have a different input-output function” from rats, says senior author Mark Harnett, the Fred and Carole Middleton Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Dendrites farther away from the cell body have fewer ion channels, which control signal processing. That was something we absolutely did not expect.”

Harnett, who studies how the biophysical features of neurons shape information processing in the brain, believes our longer, bigger dendritic arbors endow human neurons and their respective circuits with enhanced computational abilities.

Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.

Backed by startup incubator Y Combinator, Acre Designs is poised to transform the house building industry with prefabricated, net zero energy homes that are affordable and sustainable.