Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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There is something romantic about disregarding financial realities to push the limit of understanding. At the same time, starting a family dragged me out of this romantic bubble and forced me to think hard about what my heart really wants. I am committed to both my family and my career, and I accept the challenges. To those who are planning a similar course, I hope you will also embrace the burden, and that with all the stress and doubts comes clarity about your choices in life.

“In the end, I may be too poor to achieve my career dreams.”

I do not want to complain about my postdoc salary. My institution pays better than most in the country. The website for incoming postdocs notes that the funding is meant to be enough to support a single trainee—and, indeed, the stipend would be sufficient if I were single. The problem is that my stipend must also support my wife, who was only able to start working a few months ago because of visa issues and is now earning a part-time salary; our two daughters, born while I was a Ph.D. student; and my mother-in-law. With the stunning rents in Silicon Valley and the cost of preschool for our older daughter, we are losing money every month. Financial support from my family in China is the only reason I can afford to continue following my dream.

I have explored career options that would offer more financial security. Before I started my postdoc, I interviewed with several management consulting firms, which offered me triple or quadruple my current salary—but I could not bring myself to care about how to make a banking product profitable. Recently, several pharmaceutical companies tried to recruit me, promising to triple my salary. I cannot say I am not tempted. I understand that being a consultant or scientist in industry can be rewarding. But I stubbornly believe in the work I do and can’t imagine doing anything else. So, for now, at least, I will continue to pass up monetary gain to have the intellectual freedom that academia offers. I will only live once, and I want to achieve something extraordinary.

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This week electrovehicle and space transit magnate Elon Musk unveiled his master plan for the human race to become “a multi-planetary species”, starting with travel to Mars. But while I know it’s an act of remarkable hubris for me to even say this, I believe SpaceX’s plans for their Interplanetary Transport System have some pretty glaring flaws. The good news is they are flaws that are easily corrected by applying some decades-old solutions from the American and Soviet space-faring experience.

After going over the system architecture and basic spacecraft design, I think there are places where the system can be made to use less fuel, reduce manufacturing complexity, increase crew room, deliver more payload, and more.

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Tonight during Valve’s yearly Dota 2 tournament, a surprise segment introduced what could be the best new player in the world — a bot from Elon Musk-backed startup OpenAI. Engineers from the nonprofit say the bot learned enough to beat Dota 2 pros in just two weeks of real-time learning, though in that training period they say it amassed “lifetimes” of experience, likely using a neural network judging by the company’s prior efforts. Musk is hailing the achievement as the first time artificial intelligence has been able to beat pros in competitive e-sports.

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When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What’s going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians’ brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

Did you know that every time musicians pick up their instruments, there are fireworks going off all over their brain? On the outside, they may look calm and focused, reading the music and making the precise and practiced movements required. But inside their brains, there’s a party going on. How do we know this?

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In recent years 3D printing of aerospace components has made great strides with ever larger parts, faster production and synergy with other materials, including composites. AEROSPACE gets an update on the latest progress from Scott Sevcik, Head of Manufacturing Solutions at international 3D printing company Stratasys.

Scott Sevcik, Head of Manufacturing Solutions, Stratasys. (Stratasys)

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Mattis, speaking in Mountain View, a stone’s throw from Google’s campus, hopes the tech industry will help the Pentagon catch up. He was visiting the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an organization within the DoD started by his predecessor Ashton Carter in 2015 to make it easier for smaller tech companies to partner with the Department of Defense and the military. DIUx has so far sunk $100 million into 45 contracts, including with companies developing small autonomous drones that could explore buildings during military raids, and a tooth-mounted headset and microphone.

The academic and commercial spheres are seeing rapid advances in AI technology. And the Pentagon wants in.

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With sufficient training on digitized writing, spoken words, images, video streams and other digital content, ML has become the basis of voice recognition, self-driving cars, and other previously only-imagined capabilities. As billions of phones, appliances, drones, traffic lights, security systems, environmental sensors, and other radio-connected devices sum into a rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT), there now is a need to apply ML to the invisible realm of radio frequency (RF) signals, according to program manager Paul Tilghman of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office. To further that cause, DARPA today announced its new Radio Frequency Machine Learning Systems (RFMLS) program. Find out more: http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-08-11a

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What I wonder here is if you could do this with uninjured cells, remaking the whole body with new cells.

The new technique, called tissue nanotransfection, is based on a tiny device that sits on the surface of the skin of a living body. An intense, focused electric field is then applied across the device, allowing it to deliver genes to the skin cells beneath it – turning them into different types of cells.

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