What will it take for a same-sex couple—two males or two females—to be able to produce a biological child by combining their genomes in the same way that male-female couples do? Just to be clear, we’re not talking about adopting. Nor do we mean one mate fertilizes a donor egg or is fertilized with donated sperm. Those things have long existed. We mean you take two women or two men and make a baby.
And they’ve already done it with two male mice.
“Every great and difficult thing has required a strong sense of optimism,” says editor and author Kevin Kelly, who believes that we have a moral obligation to be optimistic. Tracing humanity’s progress throughout history, he’s observed that a positive outlook helps us solve problems and empowers us to forge a path forward. In this illuminating talk, he shares three reasons for optimism during challenging times, explaining how it can help us become better ancestors and create the world we want to see for ourselves and future generations.
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Continue reading “The Future Will Be Shaped by Optimists | Kevin Kelly | TED” »
Starship is getting very close to becoming real. Starship just did a 14 engine static fire which is nearly as powerful as the Saturn V that landed people on the moon. A 33 engine static fire should happen within a month.
In addition, NASA just signed up Starship for a third trip to the moon. They have now signed up for one cargo and two crew missions to the moon for a total of over $4 billion. Other customers have signed up with Starship as well.
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — NASA has awarded SpaceX a $1.15 billion contract to develop an upgraded version of its Starship lunar lander and fly a second crewed mission.
Continue reading “NASA awards SpaceX $1.15 billion contract for second Artemis lander mission” »
Jeff Bezos says he’ll give most of his money to charity, but will that do much to appease critics of his legacy?
A major vulnerability in a networking technology widely used in critical infrastructures such as spacecraft, aircraft, energy generation systems and industrial control systems was exposed by researchers at the University of Michigan and NASA.
It goes after a network protocol and hardware system called time-triggered ethernet, or TTE, which greatly reduces costs in high-risk settings by allowing mission-critical devices (like flight controls and life support systems) and less important devices (like passenger WiFi or data collection) to coexist on the same network hardware. This blend of devices on a single network arose as part of a push by many industries to reduce network costs and boost efficiency.
It would usually be cheaper to use e-fuels derived from hydrogen — rather than H2 directly — due to system costs, academic paper explains.
From wearable gadgets to battery separators, the future of sustainable tech is starting to look like a mushroom. A team of researchers from the Institute of Experimental Physics in Linz have completed a proof-of-concept study, testing whether mycelium skin could substitute plastic in the production of soft electronics. The scientists used processed skin from the mushroom Ganoderma Lucidum – a saprophytic fungus native to some parts of Europe and China that grows naturally on dead hardwood.
This works by laying electronic components on the fungal skin through a process called physical vapor deposition, used to produce thin materials. The resulting electronic circuit has high thermal stability and can withstand thousands of bending cycles. The researchers say that combining conventional electronics with the biodegradable material could help reduce waste in the production of wearable electronics and sustainable battery separators, among other uses.
Continue reading “What if We Could Make Electronics From Mushrooms? | Mashable” »
Researchers control the speed of sound in an ultracold gas, mimicking features of a curved spacetime and reproducing quantum field behavior predicted in early Universe models.
Physical dynamical processes can be modelled with differential equations that may be solved with numerical approaches, but this is computationally costly as the processes grow in complexity. In a new approach, dynamical processes are modelled with closed-form continuous-depth artificial neural networks. Improved efficiency in training and inference is demonstrated on various sequence modelling tasks including human action recognition and steering in autonomous driving.
