Lifeboat Foundation

Despite the 10-second lag, two astronauts had a lot to say about tech for space at CES 2023.

Today (Jan. 06), the International Space Station (ISS), which is the only location where people can investigate the long-term effects of living without gravity, completed the first call ever made in 4K to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2023.

In the first instance, the discussion was unsurprisingly focused on what it’s like to be living in space now. After all, it’s not every day you get to watch two astronauts in real-time casually floating a mic between each other to answer our pressing earthly questions.

The AI-powered “Moonwalkers” can be strapped onto your own shoes to make you reach a top walking speed of 11 km/h.

Billionaires are funding immortality tech. And in theory, such techology would allow those billionaires to compound their wealth and power forever. Gulp.

Avi Loeb joins John Michael Godier to discuss his new initiative the Copernicus Space Corporation. ‘Copernicus’ is a privately held, novel type of space exploration company, headquartered in Massachusetts, which fosters ultra-long-range thinking and leverages disruptive technology for new human strategies in space. Avi also discusses the Galileo Project and its scientific search for UAP. Also discussed, can we detect gravity wave signals from alien civilizations?

Avi Loeb links:
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home.
https://copernicus-initiative.com/

Continue reading “Why the Universe May Be Full of Aliens Featuring Dr. Avi Loeb” »

A team from University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University has identified a small-molecule drug that effectively reduces cholesterol by 70% in animal models.

PCSK9 inhibitors are the second most common type of medication used to manage cholesterol levels, following statins. These drugs are highly effective at reducing excess cholesterol in the blood, but unlike statins, which can be taken orally, PCSK9 inhibitors must be injected. This can be a barrier to their use for some people.

A small-molecule drug that can be taken orally has been developed by researchers at University Hospitals and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The drug has been shown to significantly reduce PCSK9 levels and lower cholesterol by 70% in animal models. These findings, published in the journal Cell Reports.

Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD) launched on January 3rd may be a breakthrough for harvesting solar energy from space.

A Caltech-designed prototype satellite containing an experiment, the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD), was launched on January 3rd of this year in what could prove to be a breakthrough for harvesting the energy of the Sun from space. The satellite goes by the name Momentus Vigoride and hitched its ride into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Solar energy from space has been the dream of science fiction writers beginning with Isaac Asimov back in 1941 in a short story called Reason which later was included in a collection that Asimov published in 1950 entitled I, Robot. In the story, Asimov described a space station that collected energy from the Sun and transmitted it by microwave beam to various locations. Asimov recognized the distinct advantage of building solar power generating stations in space out of the Earth’s shadow and therefore continuously being able to harvest the energy of the Sun.

Continue reading “The Concept of Unlimited Solar Energy From Space is One Step Closer to Reality” »

Indiegogo.

PetBot Loona, introduced by robotics company KEYi Technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) — 2023, is quite endearing. The company is currently raising funds for this project on Indiegogo (a platform to raise funds).

BioNTech has announced a strategic partnership with the UK government to provide up to 10,000 patients with personalised mRNA cancer immunotherapies by 2030.

BioNTech is famous for having partnered with Pfizer to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, based on messenger RNA (mRNA). More recently, the company has been further developing this technology to investigate its potential in treating other diseases, such as cancer. One study, which involved the injection of mRNA into colon and melanoma tumours in mice, halted tumour growth and caused a complete regression of cancer in 85% of the animals. A phase 1 trial in 231 humans is currently underway and expected to conclude in 2024.

A sharp-eyed developer at Krita noticed recently that, in the settings for their Adobe Creative Cloud account, the company had opted them (and everyone else) into a “content analysis” program whereby they “may analyze your content using techniques such as machine learning (e.g. for pattern recognition) to develop and improve our products and services.” Some have taken this to mean that it is ingesting your images for its AI. And … they do. Kind of? But it’s not that simple.

First off, lots of software out there has some kind of “share information with the developer” option, where it sends telemetry like how often you use the app or certain features, why it crashed, etc. Usually it gives you an option to turn this off during installation, but not always — Microsoft incurred the ire of many when it basically said telemetry was on by default and impossible to turn off in Windows 10.

That’s gross, but what’s worse is slipping a new sharing method and opting existing users into it. Adobe told PetaPixel that this content analysis thing “is not new and has been in place for a decade.” If they were using machine learning for this purpose and said so a decade ago, that’s quite impressive, as is that apparently no one noticed that whole time. That seems unlikely. I suspect the policy has existed in some form but has quietly evolved.