Lifeboat Foundation

Could there really be a magic pill for immortality?

WASHINGTON — The Air Force made the call to stick with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance as its launch providers for the next five years. Now it has to decide if and how to continue working with the companies that lost the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 competition — Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman.

An issue at hand is the termination of the Launch Service Agreement contracts that the Air Force awarded in October 2018 to Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, as well as to ULA.

The purpose of the agreements was to help Phase 2 competitors pay for launch vehicle development and infrastructure. Blue Origin received $500 million; Northrop Grumman $792 million and ULA $967 million. The funds were to be spread out through 2024, and the Air Force from the beginning said the LSAs would be terminated with those companies that did not win a Phase 2 procurement contract.

Continue reading “Air Force to end agreements with Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman, prepares for launch contract protests” »

SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 global pandemic, has presented scientists with a variety of conundrums. Where did the virus come from? Why is there so much clinical variability across patients? Does the virus mutate – if so, to what extent? How does this impact vaccine design? Such puzzles have brought together some of the top researchers from across the globe working in unity to uncover desperately sought-after answers. Nonetheless, certain aspects of COVID-19 infection remain unsolved. One key elephant in the room is the current lack of effective therapeutics with which to fight the virus.

But have you ever wondered: how well do those maps represent my brain? After all, no two brains are alike. And if we’re ever going to reverse-engineer the brain as a computer simulation—as Europe’s Human Brain Project is trying to do—shouldn’t we ask whose brain they’re hoping to simulate?

Enter a new kind of map: the Julich-Brain, a probabilistic map of human brains that accounts for individual differences using a computational framework. Rather than generating a static PDF of a brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is also dynamic, in that it continuously changes to incorporate more recent brain mapping results. So far, the map has data from over 24,000 thinly sliced sections from 23 postmortem brains covering most years of adulthood at the cellular level. But the atlas can also continuously adapt to progress in mapping technologies to aid brain modeling and simulation, and link to other atlases and alternatives.

In other words, rather than “just another” human brain map, the Julich-Brain atlas is its own neuromapping API—one that could unite previous brain-mapping efforts with more modern methods.

Continue reading “These Scientists Just Completed a 3D ‘Google Earth’ for the Brain” »

U.S. and U.K. defense agencies plan to award $1 million to startups at the first International Space Pitch Day in November during the Defence Space Conference in London.

The rapid pace of space technology development around the world is prompting military organizations to look beyond national borders to find promising technology. The Techstars Allied Space Accelerator established in 2019, for example, received funding from the U.S. Air Force, Netherlands Ministry of Defence, Norwegian Ministry of Defence and Norwegian Space Agency support.

SAN FRANCISCO – U.S. and U.K. defense agencies plan to award $1 million to startups at the first International Space Pitch Day in November during the Defence Space Conference in London.

Continue reading “U.S. Space Force and U.K. Ministry of Defense to hold International Space Pitch Day” »

SpaceExploration

(Inside Science) — What do a volcanologist, a pulmonologist, and a glassmaker have in common? They all worry about bubbles. The physics of how bubbles form, behave and pop is crucial to understanding natural phenomena as well as many industrial processes. According to a new study appearing in the journal Science, scientists have been getting that physics wrong for at least a couple of decades.

The new findings suggest that instead of being driven by gravity, the collapse of bubbles that form on the surface of thick liquids is driven by surface tension, in a complex, unintuitive way. And to find the truth, all the researchers had to do was turn their experiment upside down.

Continue reading “New Theory Says We’ve Been Wrong About How Bubbles Pop” »

Featured Image Source: ΔV Photos @DeltavPhotos via Twitter.

 The United States reemerged as a space power with human spaceflight capabilities when SpaceX launched NASA Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) in May. The mission, referred to as Demo-2, was the first time the agency launched astronauts from American soil since the Space Shuttle fleet was grounded in 2011. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, igniting a new era in human spaceflight. After a two-month-long stay at the orbiting laboratory, the brave pair returned aboard the Crew Dragon they called ‘Endeavour.’

Dragon Endeavour undocked from the space station’s Harmony module on August 1st. Astronauts Behnken and Hurley conducted a 19-hour return voyage. On August 2nd, Dragon reentered Earth’s fiery atmosphere at a speed of around 17,500 miles per hour with the astronauts aboard. The spacecraft experienced high temperatures over 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, it deployed its sets of parachutes to slow down and conduct a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. It was the first splashdown of an American spacecraft carrying crew in 45 years. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine shared his excitement -“We have Splashdown! Welcome home Behnken and Hurley!” he said. It is the first time the company returns humans from space. NASA and SpaceX recovery teams arrived to the spacecraft aboard the ‘Go Navigator’ ship to pick up the astronauts and Dragon. The vessel features a medical room and a helicopter landing pad.

GPT-3, the largest artificial intelligence language model, is trained on an estimated 45 terabytes of text data run through 175 billion parameters. It can do more than just autocomplete, like generate code and write stories, just like a human — but it can make errors like a human too.