Lifeboat Foundation

We teamed up with the folks behind BBC World Service’s CrowdScience to answer your questions on one topic — this week it’s all about living underwater.

[Tom Clancy]’s The Hunt For Red October is a riveting tale of a high-level Soviet defector, a cunning young intelligence analyst, a chase across the North Atlantic, and a new submarine powered by a secret stealth ‘caterpillar’ drive. Of course there weren’t a whole lot of technical details in the book, but the basic idea of this propulsion system was a magnetohydrodynamic drive. Put salt water in a tube, wrap a coil of wire around the tube, run some current through the wire, and the water spits out the back. Yes, this is a real propulsion system, and there was a prototype ferry in Japan that used the technology, but really the whole idea of a caterpillar drive is just a weird footnote in the history of propulsion.

This project for the Hackaday Prize is probably the closest we’re going to see to a caterpillar drive, and it can do it on a small remote-controlled boat. Instead of forcing water out of the back of a tube with the help of magic pixies, it’s doing it with a piston. It’s a drive for a solar boat race, and if you look at the cutaway view, it does, indeed, look like a caterpillar.

Instead of pushing water through a tube by pushing water through a magnetic field, this drive system is something like a linear motor, moving a piston back and forth. The piston contains a valve, and when the piston moves one way, it sucks water in. When the piston moves in the opposite direction, it pushes water out.

space play / pause

qunload | stop

ffullscreen shift + ←→slower / faster (latest Chrome and Safari)

Let’s decolonize the future.

Mike Carter doesn’t care if he has a funeral when he dies. Because, for a few hundred thousand dollars, he’ll be stored at a US facility with the aim of coming back in dozens or maybe hundreds of years.

Read more

From the worst wildfires to water shortages in cities.

At Annual Meeting of the New Champions 2019 in Dalian, 1–3 July “Next 10 Years: What To Expect In China’s Artificial Intelligence Future” was discussed.

At first, the scientists wondered whether it was a mistake.

Just 21 days after leaving the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, an arctic fox had arrived in Greenland. And in less than three months, it made it to Canada. The fox averaged nearly 30 miles a day (50 kilometers) — some days, though, it walked almost 100 (160 kilometers).

“When it started happening, we thought ‘is this really true?’” said Arnaud Tarroux, one of the researchers who tracked the female fox. Was there “an error in the data?”