The San Diego County Water Authority is planning to use its San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power making clean energy in the region viable, according to an article by NPR published on Friday.
Powering 130,000 homes
Continue reading “Water batteries could soon power 130,000 homes in San Diego at night time” »
The E-Walker has been tried and tested on Earth, but it’s yet to prove itself in space.
Large construction projects in space may be one step closer to reality, thanks to a new walking space robot. Researchers have designed the E-Walker — a state-of-the-art walking robot — to take on the behemoth task of space construction. A robot prototype has already been tested here on Earth by assembling a 25m Large Aperture Space Telescope. The telescope would usually be built in space, which is the E-Walker’s future duty.
Doubling up on its potential duties, a smaller-scale prototype of the same robot has also been created and shows promise for large construction applications on Earth, such as maintenance of wind turbines.
Unfortunately, the organization will not be rebuilding the damaged observatory.
The U.S. National Science Foundation issued a solicitation on Thursday for a new multidisciplinary, world-class educational center at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, according to a statement by the organization. The center will serve as a hub for STEM education and outreach.
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Zuckerberg’s plans to go down this road have the company’s investors jittery.
When Facebook rebranded to Meta last year, little did anybody know that the company would be spending billions on building its vision of the metaverse that would look uninspiring even a year later. Worse still, the company isn’t specifying exactly where it spent over $15 billion in 2022 alone, Business Insider.
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Continue reading “Meta’s metaverse bill keeps rising, crosses $15 billion in 2022” »
Mark Zuckerberg laid out Tuesday how Meta is diving deeper and deeper into the black mines of the metaverse, attempting to extract digital gold.
Zuckerberg revealed a $1,500 headset Oculus Pro, as much as a PS5, Xbox Series X and Quest 2 combined, and some updates to the looks of avatars and the integration of Microsoft business products.
When your most significant announcement is the fact that after years and years of investment, you’re on the verge of debuting virtual characters with legs, something has gone wrong.
Summary: Study reveals a hidden order in seemingly random connections between neurons.
Source: University Hospital Bonn.
In the brain, our perception arises from a complex interplay of neurons that are connected via synapses. But the number and strength of connections between certain types of neurons can vary.
Alector, a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering immuno-neurology and innate immuno-oncology, has announced the initiation of the first-in-human Phase 1 trial of AL044. The study is investigating the safety profile, pharmacokinetics (PK), pharmacodynamics (PD) and target engagement of AL044 in healthy adults.
Longevity. Technology: Headquartered in South San Francisco, California, Alector is aiming to develop an unmatched pipeline of novel potential medicines based on insights into immunology, neurology and human genetics. The company’s therapeutic candidates are intended to harness the body’s innate power to heal itself, and Alector is pioneering immuno-neurology, a novel therapeutic approach for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, and innate immuno-oncology.
Immuno-neurology targets immune dysfunction as a root cause of multiple pathologies that are drivers of degenerative brain disorders. Alector has discovered, and is developing, a broad portfolio of innate immune system programs, designed to functionally repair genetic mutations that cause dysfunction of the brain’s immune system and enable rejuvenated immune cells to counteract emerging brain pathologies. Alector’s immuno-neurology product candidates are supported by biomarkers and target genetically defined patient populations in frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
“This exoskeleton personalizes assistance as people walk normally through the real world,” said Steve Collins, associate professor of mechanical engineering who leads the Stanford Biomechatronics Laboratory, in a press release. “And it resulted in exceptional improvements in walking speed and energy economy.”
The personalization is enabled by a machine learning algorithm, which the team trained using emulators—that is, machines that collected data on motion and energy expenditure from volunteers who were hooked up to them. The volunteers walked at varying speeds under imagined scenarios, like trying to catch a bus or taking a stroll through a park.
The WHO said that case numbers last week were on the rise in several countries in the Americas and it stressed that a slowdown worldwide in new cases could be the “most dangerous” time in the outbreak.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said more than 70,000 cases have now been reported to the U.N. health agency this year, with 26 deaths.
“Globally, cases are continuing to decline, but 21 countries in the past week reported an increase in cases, mostly in the Americas, which accounted for almost 90 percent of all cases reported last week,” he told a press conference in Geneva.
Real-world data (and real-world evidence) can also play roles outside of public health emergencies like Covid and monkeypox. They can help determine the long-term effectiveness of many treatments, especially those subject to the expedited approval process, such as those used for rare diseases, and can help determine the value of drugs in general. In many cases, clinical trials are not enough to understand how well drugs really work. Janet Woodcock, the director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, has said that the clinical trial system is “broken” and that more use of real-world evidence could be an effective addition to the approval process.
The FDA has been taking steps toward using more real-world data outside of public health emergencies like Covid and monkeypox. In 2018, the agency issued guidance for use of such evidence in approving drugs. By 2021, when the FDA issued enhanced guidance on the topic, real-world evidence had been used in approving 90 medical devices and the new use of a drug, Prograf. But this is not happening enough in practice.
Failing to use real-world data means missing out not just on better understanding of the effectiveness of individual drugs but also on a chance to improve the entire pharmaceutical sector, including addressing issues like rising costs. The availability of more data on real-world outcomes from using drugs, especially gene therapies and other innovative and often very expensive treatments, would pave the way for pricing to take patient outcomes into account through approaches like value-based contracting, when health insurers base drug prices on how well drugs work in the people who take them, rather than just in premarket clinical trials.
