Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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The Space Solar Power Project (SSPP) began in 2011 when Donald Bren — philanthropist, chairman of the Irvine Company, and a lifetime member of the Caltech Board of Trustees — and Caltech’s then-president Jean-Lou Chameau came together to discuss the potential for a space-based solar power research project. By 2013, Bren and his wife (Caltech trustee Brigitte Bren) began funding the project through the Donald Bren Foundation, which will eventually exceed $100 million. As Bren said in a recent Caltech press release:

“For many years, I’ve dreamed about how space-based solar power could solve some of humanity’s most urgent challenges. Today, I’m thrilled to be supporting Caltech’s brilliant scientists as they race to make that dream a reality.”

While the technology behind solar cells has existed since the late 19th century, generating solar power in space presents some serious challenges. For one thing, solar panels are heavy and require extensive wiring to transmit power, making them expensive and difficult to launch. To overcome these challenges, the SSPP team had to create a satellite that would be light enough for cost-effective launches yet strong enough to withstand the extreme environment of space. This required envisioning and developing new technologies, architectures, materials, and structures.

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Scientists at Harvard Medical School have investigated why we age, and identified a possible way to reverse it. In tests in mice, the team showed that epigenetic “software glitches” drive the symptoms of aging – and a system reboot can reverse them, potentially extending lifespan.

Our genome contains our complete DNA blueprint, which is found in every single cell of our bodies. But it’s not the whole picture – an extra layer of information, known as the epigenome, sits above that and controls which genes are switched on and off in different types of cells. It’s as though every cell in our body is working from the same operating manual (the genome), but the epigenome is like a table of contents that directs different cells to different chapters (genes). After all, lung cells need very different instructions to heart cells.

Environmental and lifestyle factors like diet, exercise and even childhood experiences could change epigenetic expression over our lifetimes. Epigenetic changes have been linked to the rate of biological aging, but whether they drove the symptoms of aging or were a symptom themselves remained unclear.

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Chromatin structures and transcriptional networks are known to specify cell identity during development which directs cells into metaphorical valleys in the Waddington landscape. Cells must retain their identity through the preservation of epigenetic information and a state of low Shannon entropy for the maintenance of optimal function. Yeast studies in the 1990s have reported that a loss of epigenetic information compared to genetics can cause aging. Few other studies also confirmed that epigenetic changes are not just a biomarker but a cause of aging in yeasts.

Epigenetic changes associated with aging include changes in DNA methylation (DNAme) patterns, H3K27me3, H3K9me3, and H3K9me3. Many epigenetic changes have been observed to follow a specific pattern. However, the reason for changes in the mammalian epigenome is not yet known. A few clues can be obtained from yeast, where DSB is a significant factor whose repair requires epigenetic regulators Esa1, Gcn5, Rpd3, Hst1, and Sir2. As per the ‘‘RCM’’ hypothesis and ‘Information Theory of Aging’’, aging in eukaryotes occurs due to the loss of epigenetic information and transcriptional networks in response to cellular damage such as a crash injury or a DSB.

A new study in the journal Cell aimed to determine whether epigenetic changes are a cause of mammalian aging.

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WALLOPS ISLAND, Va. — A rocket launch set for Monday, January 23 in Virginia will be visible to much of the east coast of the United States, according to NASA.

The 59-foot-tall Electron rocket from Rocket Lab USA is set to take off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility along the southeastern coast of Virginia sometime between 6 and 8 p.m.

The mission, named “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” will deploy radio frequency monitoring satellites for Virginia based geospatial analytics company HawkEye 360. NASA said the mission will help foster a growing low-Earth space economy.

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Since its launch in November last year, ChatGPT has become an extraordinary hit. Essentially a souped-up chatbot, the AI program can churn out answers to the biggest and smallest questions in life, and draw up college essays, fictional stories, haikus, and even job application letters. It does this by drawing on what it has gleaned from a staggering amount of text on the internet, with careful guidance from human experts. Ask ChatGPT a question, as millions have in recent weeks, and it will do its best to respond – unless it knows it cannot. The answers are confident and fluently written, even if they are sometimes spectacularly wrong.

The program is the latest to emerge from OpenAI, a research laboratory in California, and is based on an earlier AI from the outfit, called GPT-3. Known in the field as a large language model or LLM, the AI is fed hundreds of billions of words in the form of books, conversations and web articles, from which it builds a model, based on statistical probability, of the words and sentences that tend to follow whatever text came before. It is a bit like predictive text on a mobile phone, but scaled up massively, allowing it to produce entire responses instead of single words.

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MicroLED’ or Electroluminescent quantum dot screens and sensors are coming to your neighborhood soon. The linked article states: What does this mean? Just about any flat or curved surface could be a screen. This has long been the promise of a variety of technologies, not to mention countless sci-fi shows and movies, but electroluminescent QD has the potential to actually make it happen.

We’ve seen a new, top-secret prototype display technology that will soon be in TVs, phones and more.

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Did Mark bet his Zuckbucks on the wrong horse?

Artificial Intelligence or AI is the next big tech shift that users can expect in the coming years, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently said while interacting with a Reddit user last week. Gates thinks that metaverse and Web3 are revolutionary but not quite as much as AI.

Gates’ comments come at a time when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg appears to have splurged his riches on chasing a pipe dream with the concept of a digital universe where everybody logs in to connect, work, and play is not catching any traction anymore.

On the other hand, ChatGPT, a chatbot from OpenAI, has caught everybody’s attention.

Continue reading “Bill Gates reveals the next big thing in tech, and it’s not metaverse” | >

Australia has all the key critical minerals to power the next 100 years.

An Australian-based startup, Recharge Industries Pty, is planning to build a A$300 million (US$210 million) factory that can build lithium-ion batteries that do not have materials imported from China, Bloomberg.

Though Australia is the world’s largest supplier of lithium, a vital battery metal, it currently sends most of its battery raw materials to be processed into components in China.

Petmal/iStock.

Continue reading “This China-free lithium battery plant can power the next 100 years” | >

The lens is inserted into the eye of the patient to detect the biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease.

The KIMM (Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials) has developed South Korea’s first smart lens technology to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. The KIMM research team has worked on this project in collaboration with Yonsei University.

ChrisChrisW/iStock.

The lens is Korea’s first intraocular smart lens technology that can diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. Bioactive Materials, a popular journal in the field of biomaterials, published the results of the research.

Continue reading “Korea’s smart lens technology could detect Alzheimer’s at early stages” | >

It is the most distant atomic hydrogen radio signal “by a large margin” and it could teach us a great deal about star formation.

Astronomers from McGill University in Canada and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru detected an atomic hydrogen radio signal originating 8.8 billion light-years from Earth.

As the statement points out, “this is also the first confirmed detection of strong lensing of 21 cm emission from a galaxy.”

Mint/Getty.

Continue reading “Astronomers just detected the furthest atomic hydrogen signal ever” | >