Lifeboat Foundation

In a technology first, a team of NASA engineers has demonstrated fully autonomous X-ray navigation in space—a capability that could revolutionize NASA’s ability in the future to pilot robotic spacecraft to the far reaches of the solar system and beyond.

The demonstration, which the team carried out with an experiment called Station Explorer for X-ray Timing and Navigation Technology, or SEXTANT, showed that millisecond pulsars could be used to accurately determine the location of an object moving at thousands of miles per hour in space—similar to how the Global Positioning System, widely known as GPS, provides positioning, navigation, and timing services to users on Earth with its constellation of 24 operating satellites.

“This demonstration is a breakthrough for future deep space exploration,” said SEXTANT Project Manager Jason Mitchell, an aerospace technologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “As the first to demonstrate X-ray navigation fully autonomously and in real-time in space, we are now leading the way.”

Researchers at Duke University have managed to create functional human muscle tissue using skin cells as the starting point[1]. This research builds on their previous work from 2015, when they grew the first functioning muscle tissue using cells obtained from muscle biopsies[2].

Being able to create muscle cells using non-muscle tissue opens the door for scientists to grow muscle cells in bulk, provides an easier path to genome editing and gene therapies, offers a supply for basic research studies, and could help create personalized models for rare muscle diseases, leading to better patient outcomes.

By now, every interested news-junkie is aware that Bitcoin plummeted from $15,000 to $13,000 (USD exchange rate) on January 11, 2018. This morning, every news outlet and armchair analyst attributes the drop to the Korean government signaling that it will ban Bitcoin trading among its citizens.

With Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un butting heads over nuclear missile tests and the upcoming Winter Olympics, you would think that South Korea has other priorities than banning Bitcoin.

As with all news—except accidents—the Korean plans were known by a few insiders (in this case, government bureaucrats), and so the influence on value was bigger than the drop that occurred after the news story. In the days before this “event”, it was probably responsible for a drop of about $4500 in exchange value.

Listen up Wild Ducks! We have heard this before. On Sept 11, China announced the exact same thing. I wrote about it in the most popular article of my 7 years as Blogger: Bad News is Good News for Bitcoin Investors.

Continue reading “Say it again, Bitcoin Investors: ‘Bad News is Good News’” »

http://www.playboy.com/articles/dna-to-find-the-one

Early Bird ends soon!

Have you got your tickets yet? If not, then you just have a few days to do so and save. Early Bird pricing ends on Monday, 11:59 pm CET.

The 2018 Undoing Aging Conference is focused on the cellular and molecular repair of age-related damage as the basis of therapies to bring aging under full medical control.

Continue reading “The 2018 Undoing Aging Conference” »

Today’s vision of a smart home has more to do with what’s technologically possible than what people really need.

Thus the endless parade of internet-connected wine openers, water bottles, meat thermometers and refrigerators, and a dearth of automation that would clean and fold our laundry, pick up things around the house or assist aging people as their physical strength wanes.

Not that some tinkerers aren’t trying to come up with life-changing tools. The annual Consumer Electronics Show, which opened in Las Vegas on Tuesday, is a showcase of the latest innovations from big corporations and tiny startups. Some of these inventions could soon be useful to consumers. Others look outlandishly impractical — or maybe it’s too soon to tell.

U.S.-trained Chinese-born talent is becoming a key force in driving Chinese companies’ global expansion and the country’s efforts to dominate next-generation technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Where college graduates once coveted a prestigious overseas job and foreign citizenship, many today gravitate toward career opportunities at home, where venture capital is now plentiful and the government dangles financial incentives for cutting-edge research.

“More and more talent is moving over because China is really getting momentum in the innovation area,” said Ken Qi, a headhunter for Spencer Stuart and leader of its technology practice. “This is only the beginning.”

Ever since technological advancements made drones possible, people have warned of the potential dangers of weaponised UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), which could effectively become murderous slaughterbots we need to defend ourselves against.

Now, it looks like those fears have become a reality. The Russian Ministry of Defence claims its forces in Syria were attacked a week ago by a swarm of home-made drones – the first time such a coordinated assault has been reported in a military action.

According to the Ministry of Defence, Russian forces at the Khmeimim air base and Tartus naval facility “successfully warded off a terrorist attack with massive application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)” last Friday night.

Continue reading “First-Ever Drone Swarm Attack Has Struck Russian Military Bases, Sources Claim” »

Crowdsourcing the fight against drug-resistance infection.