Lifeboat Foundation

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office launched their newest space observation satellites today in a largely classified mission called “Silent Barker.”

The joint mission flew Sept. 10 on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. Once operational, the satellites will track objects — and potentially nefarious activities — within geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth.

“Working together, we’ve developed a system in a relatively short amount of time that is going to provide us with unprecedented coverage of what’s going on in the GEO belts,” NRO director Christopher Scolese told reporters during an Aug. 28 pre-launch briefing.

Elon Musk tweeted out his congratulatins to SpaceX for completing and documented the 57 items required by the FAA for Flight 2 of Starship. He said taht 6 of the 63 items refer to later flights.

Congrats to SpaceX for completing & documented the 57 items required by the FAA for Flight 2 of Starship!

Apptronik, an Austin-based robotics start-up, has revealed its latest humanoid robot, Apollo. Standing at 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, Apollo is designed for mass production and safe human-robot collaboration. Unlike traditional robots, Apollo uses electricity instead of hydraulics, making it both safer and more efficient.

Apollo is equipped with a four-hour battery life that can be easily exchanged for continuous use up to 22 hours, allowing it to perform physically demanding and dangerous tasks, improving supply chains and reducing human risk.

To ensure that Apollo is accessible and friendly, Austin-based company Argodesign has equipped the robot with features such as digital panels on its chest for clear communication, intentional movements like head rotation, and a friendly face.

America’s No. 2 publicly traded rocket company just became No. 1 in reusing soggy rocket engines.

Roman Space Telescope team is integrating a complex electrical harness, crucial for the spacecraft’s communication and power. After a detailed two-year construction and a preparatory “bakeout” process, assembly into the spacecraft is ongoing, with future installations planned for power components.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team has begun integrating and testing the spacecraft’s electrical cabling, or harness, which enables different parts of the observatory to communicate with one another. Additionally, the harness provides power and helps the central computer monitor the observatory’s function via an array of sensors. This brings the mission a step closer to surveying billions of cosmic objects and untangling mysteries like dark energy following its launch by May 2027.

Tesla’s (TSLA) stock is rising in pre-market trading on an optimistic new report about the automaker’s Dojo supercomputer coming from Morgan Stanley.

The firm massively increased its price target on Tesla’s stock because of it.

Dojo is Tesla’s own custom supercomputer platform built from the ground up for AI machine learning and, more specifically, for video training using the video data coming from its fleet of vehicles.

Similarly, allowing the MyoLegs to flail around for a while in a seemingly aimless fashion gave them better performance with locomotion tasks, as the researchers described in another paper presented at the recent Robotics Science and Systems meeting. Vittorio Caggiano, a Meta researcher on the project who has a background in both AI and neuroscience, says that scientists in the fields of neuroscience and biomechanics are learning from the MyoSuite work. “This fundamental knowledge [of how motor control works] is very generalizable to other systems,” he says. “Once they understand the fundamental mechanics, then they can apply those principles to other areas.”

This year, MyoChallenge 2023 (which will also culminate at the NeurIPS meeting in December) requires teams to use the MyoArm to pick up, manipulate, and accurately place common household objects and to use the MyoLegs to either pursue or evade an opponent in a game of tag.

Emo Todorov, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, has worked on similar biomechanical models as part of the popular Mujoco physics simulator. (Todorov was not involved with the current Meta research but did oversee Kumar’s doctoral work some years back.) He says that MyoSuite’s focus on learning general representations means that control strategies can be useful for “a whole family of tasks.” He notes that their generalized control strategies are analogous to the neuroscience principle of muscle synergies, in which the nervous system activates groups of muscles at once to build up to larger gestures, thus reducing the computational burden of movement. “MyoSuite is able to construct such representations from first principles,” Todorov says.

Scientists have successfully grown kidneys made of mostly human cells inside pig embryos — taking researchers yet another step down the long road toward generating viable human organs for transplant.

The results, reported September 7 in Cell Stem Cell, mark the first time a solid humanized organ, one with both human and animal cells, has been grown inside another species.

The work represents an important advance in the methods needed to grow humanized kidneys, hearts, and pancreases in animals.

Cells hidden in the skull may point to a way to detect, diagnose and treat inflamed brains.

A detailed look at the skull reveals that bone marrow cells there change and are recruited to the brain after injury, possibly traveling through tiny channels connecting the skull and the outer protective layer of the brain. Paired with the discovery that inflammation in the skull is disease-specific, these new findings collectively suggest the skull’s marrow could serve as a target to track and potentially treat neurological disorders involving brain inflammation, researchers report August 9 in Cell.

New observations of skull cell signals and skull tunnels suggest bone marrow there could be used to monitor neurological diseases.