Lifeboat Foundation

Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft, a demonstration satellite that could inform future space junk cleanup efforts, is now in orbit after a successful launch from New Zealand on Sunday. The satellite was sent to space atop an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab. Its mission, which was selected by Japan’s space agency (JAXA) for Phase I of the Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration program, will see ADRAS-J rendezvous with an old Japanese rocket upper stage that’s been in orbit since 2009.

There it goes! 🛰️👋

ADRAS-J is now in orbit, ready to start its mission of rendezvousing with an aging piece of space debris and observing it closely to determine whether it can be deorbited in future.

Te emergence of spacetime.

Shared with Dropbox.

Does life appear independently on different planets in the galaxy? Or does it spread from world to world? Or does it do both?

New research shows how life could spread via a basic, simple pathway: cosmic dust.

One thing scientists have learned in the past few decades is that life on Earth might have had an early start.

Many believe deep learning will continue to advance and play a crucial role in achieving AGI — but it does have its limitations.

Scientific research continuously expands our collective knowledge and pushes innovation forward. But what good is that innovation if it isn’t accessible to large swaths of the global population?

English is the standard language for most scientific communication — nearly 98% of scientific research is published in English. While standardizing scientific publications into a single language can streamline discussion, it is incredibly limiting for populations that don’t speak English.

A UCLA-led project aims to alleviate this issue. A collaboration among the UCLA Brain Research Institute, the UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the nonprofit organization Knowing Neurons is translating the informational content on Knowing Neurons’ platform into Spanish. Created by a group of graduate students at UCLA and USC in 2012, Knowing Neurons works to make neuroscience accessible to people interested in learning about the brain.

The invisible substance called dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology. Perhaps, a new study suggests, this strange substance arises from a ‘dark mirror universe’ that’s been linked to ours since the dawn of time.

In an age of increasingly advanced robotics, one team has well and truly bucked the trend, instead finding inspiration within the pinhead-sized brain of a tiny flying insect in order to build a robot that can deftly avoid collisions with very little effort and energy expenditure.

An insect’s tiny brain is an unlikely source of biomimicry, but researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Bielefeld University in Germany believed it was an ideal system to apply to how robots move. Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) possess remarkably simple but effective navigational skills, using very little brainpower to swiftly travel along invisible straight lines, then adjusting accordingly – flying in a line angled to the left or the right – to avoid obstacles.

With such a tiny brain, the fruit fly has limited computational resources available to it while in flight – a biological model, the scientists believed, that could be adapted to use in the ‘brain’ of a robot for efficient, low-energy and obstacle-avoiding locomotion.

His ideas should have been used not lobotomies.

Neuropsychopharmacol ogy volume 37, pages 2883–2884 (2012) Cite this article.

Both models are set to arrive by 2030

By Paul Horrell | 2 days ago.