Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 35

SpaceX says it is ready to offer the world’s most advanced GPS system using the Starlink constellation. SpaceX will have a huge advantage over the 31 GPS satellites in orbit as they already have thousands of satellites in orbit with this number increasing to tens of thousands as soon as Starship is operational.

More importantly, Starlink satellites are 20 times closer to the Earth than regular GPS satellites which makes their signal stronger. In addition, SpaceX is moving towards flying their satellites even closer to the Earth. These new satellites will be flying almost twice as close as the current ones!

The company made its pitch in a Wednesday letter to the FCC after the commission kicked off a public inquiry about developing alternatives to GPS, which has long been run through a single provider, the US Defense Department.

The FCC’s goal is to usher in Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) solutions to complement GPS. In response, SpaceX sent a five-page letter that noted: “One opportunity stands out as a particularly ripe, low-hanging fruit: facilitating the rapid deployment of next-generation low-Earth orbit (‘LEO’) satellite constellations that can deliver PNT as a service alongside high-speed, low-latency broadband and ubiquitous mobile connectivity.”

The letter says SpaceX has already been working on a PNT system for its cellular Starlink service, which is in public beta and will launch through T-Mobile in July.

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Using global land use and carbon storage data from the past 175 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Cognizant AI Labs have trained an artificial intelligence system to develop optimal environmental policy solutions that can advance global sustainability initiatives of the United Nations.

The AI tool effectively balances various complex trade-offs to recommend ways of maximizing carbon storage, minimizing economic disruptions and helping improve the environment and people’s everyday lives, according to a paper published today in the journal Environmental Data Science.

The project is among the first applications of the UN-backed Project Resilience, a team of scientists and experts working to tackle global decision-augmentation problems—including ambitious sustainable development goals this decade—through part of a broader effort called AI for Good.

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University of New Mexico researchers studying the health risks posed by gadolinium, a toxic rare earth metal used in MRI scans, have found that oxalic acid, a molecule found in many foods, can generate nanoparticles of the metal in human tissues.

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Diabetes has no well-established cure; thus, its management is critical for avoiding severe health complications involving multiple organs. This requires frequent glycaemia monitoring, and the gold standards for this are fingerstick tests. During the last decades, several blood-withdrawal-free platforms have been being studied to replace this test and to improve significantly the quality of life of people with diabetes (PWD). Devices estimating glycaemia level targeting blood or biofluids such as tears, saliva, breath and sweat, are gaining attention; however, most are not reliable, user-friendly and/or cheap. Given the complexity of the topic and the rise of diabetes, a careful analysis is essential to track scientific and industrial progresses in developing diabetes management systems. Here, we summarize the emerging blood glucose level (BGL) measurement methods and report some examples of devices which have been under development in the last decades, discussing the reasons for them not reaching the market or not being really non-invasive and continuous. After discussing more in depth the history of Raman spectroscopy-based researches and devices for BGL measurements, we will examine if this technique could have the potential for the development of a user-friendly, miniaturized, non-invasive and continuous blood glucose-monitoring device, which can operate reliably, without inter-patient variability, over sustained periods.

Diabetes is a lifelong disease that affects more than 400 millions of people worldwide (WHO. Diabetes, 2022). Emerging reports from the International Diabetes Federation state that diabetes is set to rise very fast, estimating 700 millions of cases in the next 25 years (IDF Diabetes Atlas, 2019). Among the various types of diabetes, all characterized by high blood glucose levels, the main two types are type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune condition where the pancreas produces little or no insulin, and type 2 diabetes, a metabolic disorder that results in hyperglycaemia due to insulin resistance. Diabetes, and related risk factors such as microvascular (retinopathy, nephropathy, and neuropathy) and macrovascular metabolic disorders, is so widespread that it has been defined “the epidemic of the century” (Kharroubi, 2015).

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Earlier this month, Aurora Innovation kicked off driverless truck operations in Texas, starting off with a freight route between Dallas and Houston for commercial customers. The SAE Level 4 trucks, operating without a safety driver in the cab, have been making the 250-mile route that has been the focus of quite a bit of testing by several autonomous truck developers, many of which have been getting driverless truck infrastructure ready.

Getting to this point took years of research and plenty of on-road testing, in environments open and closed to regular traffic, with Aurora Innovation achieving a successful round of validation testing. In fact, years of supervised testing by Aurora has already seen 10,000 customer loads delivered by its prototypes, spanning some 3 million miles.

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How much water did Mars have in its ancient past and when did it disappear? This is what a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters hopes to address as an international team of scientists investigated Mars’ ancient water cycle processes, including its transport mechanisms between the surface and subsurface. This study has the potential to help scientists better understand ancient Mars and whether the Red Planet could have had the ingredients for life as we know it.

For the study, the researchers used computer models to simulate the length of time that liquid water on the surface of Mars billions of years ago required to go from the surface to the subsurface, specifically to mile-deep aquifers. While this same process takes only a few days on Earth, the researchers estimated that it took between 50 to 200 years on Mars for liquid water to go from the surface to the subsurface aquifers.

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