Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10166

Even before she was born, Elianna Constantino had already cheated death.

Elianna has a rare inherited blood disorder called alpha thalassemia major, which prevents her red blood cells from forming properly. The disease, which has no cure, is usually fatal for a developing fetus.

But while still in her mother’s womb, Elianna received a highly daring treatment. Doctors isolated healthy blood stem cells from her mother and injected them through a blood vessel that runs down the umbilical cord. Four months later, Elianna was born with a loud cry and a glistening head of hair, defying all medical odds.

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LAS CRUCES, NM (Spaceport America PR) — Student rocketeers from around the globe will gather at Spaceport America June 21–23 for the Second Annual Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition for student rocketry teams. The public in invited to meet the team and see their projects on June 19 in nearby Las Cruces, NM. Spaceport America is located between the cities of Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

More than 130 teams from US and international colleges and universities – including Canada, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Mexico, Poland, Turkey, Switzerland, as well as 31 of the 50 US States, plus the District of Columbia, and four of 13 Canadian provinces and territories – are registered. The competition will be challenging for the participants and exciting for spectators, as students will be launching solid, liquid, and hybrid rockets to target altitudes of 10,000 and 30,000 feet.

Among the events open to the public, under the auspices of the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association and Spaceport America, are:

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Pasadena-based artificial intelligence tech startup Oben is about to roll out its first product, PAI (Personal AI), a consumer app designed to let users create an AI-driven avatar with their own look and voice.

Its underlying AI technology is already getting some select professional use. Overall, Oben’s team believes AI can have a wide range of uses including in virtual and augmented reality, gaming, content creation and retail.

With PAI, users essentially “teach” the app about themselves. “You take a selfie, and a visual avatar is ready in the app,” Oben CEO and co-founder Nikhil Jain explained, adding that users can then customize their look. Plus, simply by speaking a few sentences, users can teach their avatar to talk or sing. These features can be used on social media and the like.

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Elon Musk’s Boring Co. is the winner in a bid to build a multibillion-dollar high-speed express train to Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The result gives the young company a big boost in legitimacy as it tries to get transportation projects underway in Los Angeles and Washington.

The company beat out a consortium that included Mott MacDonald, the civil engineering firm that designed a terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport, and JLC Infrastructure, an infrastructure fund backed by former basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson, people with knowledge of the matter said. The city is expected to announce the news as soon as Thursday, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

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This ancient interstellar dust formed the Earth and the solar system.

Particles collected from Earth’s upper atmosphere, originally deposited by comets, are older than our Solar System, scientists say – and these fine bits of interstellar dust could teach us about how planets and stars form from the very beginning.

These cosmic particles have lived through at least 4.6 billion years and travelled across incredible distances, according to the new research into their chemical composition.

The international team of scientists behind this study are confident that we’re looking at the very basic materials making up the planetary bodies currently whizzing around our Sun. For anyone studying the origins of the Universe, it’s a fantastic finding.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Found Interstellar Dust on Earth That’s Older Than Our Solar System” | >

During Hurricane Katrina and other severe storms that have hit New Orleans, power outages, flooding and wind damage combined to cut off people from clean drinking water, food, medical care, shelter, prescriptions and other vital services.

In a year-long project, researchers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories teamed up with the City of New Orleans to analyze ways to increase community resilience and improve the availability of critical lifeline services during and after severe weather.

The team used historical hurricane scenarios to model how storms cause localized flooding, disrupt the electrical system and cut off parts of the community from lifeline services. Sandia researchers then developed a tool to analyze and identify existing clusters of businesses and community resources in areas less prone to inundation—such as gas stations, grocery stores and pharmacies that could be outfitted with microgrids to boost resilience.

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