Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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SpaceX was founded to increase access to space and help make life multiplanetary.

In just this year, we’ve launched 114 successful Falcon missions and counting for our commercial and government customers, deployed ~1,700 @Starlink satellites to provide high-speed internet for millions of people all around the world, and made extraordinary strides developing Starship’s capability to return humanity to the Moon and ultimately send people to Mars.

If you want to join the team and help build a more exciting future, check out the latest job openings across the company → https://www.spacex.com/careers

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We all start our lives as symmetric balls of cells. In humans, during the first few weeks after fertilization, embryonic cells undergo several rounds of division, increasing their mass. Then comes gastrulation, the process that changes everything and establishes our body plan. During gastrulation, the collection of uniform cells that make up the early embryo break symmetry and reorganize into a multi-layered structure with distinct cell types.

At this pivotal moment, our body plan is set. Gastrulation also establishes the three body axes: head–tail, front–back, and left–right. This process requires cells to interact and coordinate with each other with astonishing precision. However, how this is achieved is still largely a mystery.

The Trivedi Group at EMBL Barcelona studies how cells give rise to our body plan and has now published a study in the journal Development that may enhance our understanding of early mammalian development.

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CWISE J1249 is the first known brown dwarf-like object to leave the Milky Way.

While stars typically follow predictable paths around the Milky Way, a groundbreaking discovery revealed a hypervelocity object, CWISE J124909.08+362116.0, speeding out of the galaxy at nearly 1 million miles per hour. This remarkable find, credited to NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project, marks the first time an object of such low mass, possibly a brown dwarf or small star, has been observed breaking free from the galaxy’s gravitational pull.

Using data from NASA’s WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission, citizen scientists identified the faint, fast-moving object. Initial observations from 2009–2011, followed by confirmations using ground-based telescopes, led to this discovery. The study, now published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, underscores the power of citizen science in advancing astronomical research.

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Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new stealthy malware loader called BabbleLoader that has been observed in the wild delivering information stealer families such as WhiteSnake and Meduza.

BabbleLoader is an “extremely evasive loader, packed with defensive mechanisms, that is designed to bypass antivirus and sandbox environments to deliver stealers into memory,” Intezer security researcher Ryan Robinson said in a report published Sunday.

Evidence shows that the loader is being used in several campaigns targeting both English and Russian-speaking individuals, primarily singling out users looking for generic cracked software as well as business professionals in finance and administration by passing it off as accounting software.

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The rebirth of commercial supersonic flight has kind of, sort of come to pass as Dawn Aerospace announces that its 16-ft (4.8-m) autonomous Mk-II Aurora rocket-powered aircraft broke the sound barrier with a speed of Mach 1.1 on November 12, 2024.

Ever since the Anglo-French Concorde retired in 2003, civil supersonic flight has been something of a lost art. In recent years, a number of startups have been working on various projects to create a new generation of supersonic transports that are quieter, greener, more efficient, and cost effective to operate.

Now, one supersonic aircraft has actually taken flight, albeit in the form of an uncrewed experimental craft with a wingspan of 13 ft (4 m) and a dry weight of 880 lb (200 kg). In the skies over New Zealand’s Glentanner Aerodrome near the base of Aoraki/Mount Cook, the Mk-II Aurora hit Mach 1.1 while climbing to an altitude of 82,500 ft (25,150 m).

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Researchers have developed a method to precisely locate hydrogen atoms within nanofilams, a breakthrough with significant implications for superconductivity and other material properties.

Their study, employing nuclear reaction analysis and ion channeling, revealed how hydrogen and its isotopes are distributed within titanium nanofilms, offering insights into tuning the material properties for various applications including hydrogen storage and catalysis.

Impact of hydrogen on material properties.

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The initial product from this collaboration will be a 20-qubit system integrated with NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchip, facilitating hybrid quantum-classical computing. This integration is expected to drive advancements in various fields, including financial services and artificial intelligence.

Through this joint venture, SDT and Anyon Technologies aim to establish a unique and robust partnership in the Asian quantum computing sector, leveraging their combined expertise to lead the commercialization and supply of superconducting quantum computers in the region.

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Now is the time to banish low-level radioactive energy sources from facilities that house and conduct experiments with superconducting qubits, according to a pair of recently published studies. Significantly improving quantum device coherence times is a key step toward an era of practical quantum computing.

Two complementary articles, published in the journal PRX Quantum and the Journal of Instrumentation, outline which sources of interfering ionizing radiation are most problematic for superconducting quantum computers and how to address them. The findings set the stage for quantitative study of errors caused by radiation effects in shielded underground facilities.

A research team led by physicists at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in collaboration with colleagues at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with multiple academic partners, published their findings to assist the quantum computing community to prepare for the next generation of qubit development.

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A theoretical astrophysicist from the University of Kansas may have solved a nearly two-decade-old mystery over the origins of an unusual “zebra” pattern seen in high-frequency radio pulses from the Crab Nebula.

His findings have just been published in Physical Review Letters.

The Crab Nebula features a neutron star at its center that has formed into a 12-mile-wide pulsar pinwheeling electromagnetic radiation across the cosmos.

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