Lifeboat Foundation

Going up? Attention space elevator button pushers!

A feature-length documentary called “Sky Line” is being released this month, an impressive view that follows a group of scientists and entrepreneurs as egos collide in an attempt to reach for the stars.

The film, which centers on the real-life building of the once fantastical space elevator concept, will debut at DOC NYC 2015 – America’s largest documentary festival — and will be released on all major On Demand platforms on November 20th, 2015.

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The inky black of the outer solar system just got a little brighter. A speck of light spotted in October 2015 is a rocky world more than 3 times more distant than Pluto – the farthest body in our solar system ever seen.

“We don’t know anything about its orbit,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, whose team discovered the new addition. “We just know it’s the most distant object known.”

Sheppard announced the new object, called V774104, on 10 November at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences, held in National Harbor, Maryland.

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Scientists have discovered a way to authenticate or identify any object by generating an unbreakable ID based on atoms.

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The future of graphene looks abundant as scientists develop a new method of production that’ll cut costs by over $1,000! — B.J. Murphy for Serious Wonder.

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“The Sundance Institute—the organization responsible for the annual film festival that has given rise to the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Ava DuVernay—is looking to nurture a whole new kind of talent: virtual reality filmmakers.”

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Sugars may taste divine, but they’re also highly reactive molecules that progressively stiffen your body in a process called glycation. Scientists have now synthesised the primary molecule formed in glycation for the first time, leading to hope that drugs can be designed to break them apart.

What is glycation?

In our bodies sugars continuously react with proteins in an unregulated manner in a process known as glycation. This leads to the formation of abnormal chemical modifications of the protein which may impair its normal function. These sugar-modifications are collectively known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) and can be subdivided in two main categories. First are the modifications that affect a single amino acid. The second category consists of modifications that link two amino acids together in a structure called a crosslink.

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Animals use blood for cooling and power delivery. Why can’t computers, too?

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Enjoy a little taste of life on the grid! While watching TRON: Legacy recently, I decided that my next party needed to channel some of the cool vibe of the Daft Punk dj-ed bar. Most people are probably familiar with the fact that gin and tonics glow under black lights (there’s even a great instructable about it) but what if you’re not a big fan of g&t? Thanks to the fantastic Kryptonite Candy instructable, I learned that vitamin B2 (also know as riboflavin) glows yellow. I decided to experiment to see what adding tonic water and B2 could do to some of my favourite drinks.

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Solar power still amounts for a small share of net electricity generation around the world. In the USA, for instance, as of December 2014 it was responsible for just 0.45% of the total electricity produced.

Things are changing quite quickly, however, and if the German think tank Agora Energiewende is right, faster than expected.

The main obstacle to a more widespread adoption of photovoltaic so far, has been cost: solar used to be very expensive compared to coal or gas, but, according to Agora — that recently commissioned a study on the subject to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems — this is no longer true.

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