Lifeboat Foundation

The California-based Matternet has been testing its Model M2 drone over the past four years in the US as part of the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) program. Matternet says getting the green light from the FAA could help streamline the process of “implementing new networks and getting approvals.”

Matternet partnered with UPS in 2019 to deliver medical supplies in North Carolina, and later started delivering prescriptions in Florida. Matternet also expanded its footprint to Switzerland, where it teamed up with the Swiss Post to deliver lab samples and blood tests. The program was briefly suspended in 2019 after its drones suffered two crashes in the country, but Matternet has since announced that it’s taking over the Swiss Post’s drone delivery program starting in 2023.

In a statement, the FAA says Matternet’s Model M2 drone “meets all federal regulations for safe, reliable and controllable operations and provides a level of safety equivalent to existing airworthiness standards applicable to other categories of aircraft.” The four-rotor drone’s been approved to carry four-pound payloads and fly at an altitude of 400 feet or lower with a maximum speed of 45mph.

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

By Tyler Benster.

Neuroscientists have a dizzying array of methods to listen in on hundreds or even thousands of neurons in the brain and have even developed tools to manipulate the activity of individual cells. Will this unprecedented access to the brain allow us to finally crack the mystery of how it works? In 2017, Jonas and Kording published a controversial research article, “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?” that argues maybe not. To make their point, the authors turn to their “model organism” of choice: a MOS 6502 processor as popularized by the Apple I, Commodore 64, and Atari Video Game System. Jonas and Kording argue that for an electrical engineer, a satisfying description of the processor would break it into modules, like an adder or subtractor, and submodules, like the transistor, to form a hierarchy of information processing. They suggest that, while popular methods from neuroscience might reveal interesting structure in the activity of the brain, researchers often use techniques that would fail to reveal a hierarchy of information processing if applied to the (presumably much simpler) computer processor.

Continue reading “Can we reverse engineer the brain like a computer?” »

CityU

Researchers have discovered a low-cost, direct method to turn commonly used 3D printable polymers into lightweight, ultra-tough, biocompatible hybrid carbon microlattices. More importantly, these microlattices are 100 times stronger than regular polymers.

Few things in the Universe keep the beat as reliably as an atom’s pulse.

Yet even the most advanced ‘atomic’ clocks based on variations of these quantum timekeepers lose count when pushed to their limits.

Physicists have known for some time that entangling atoms can help tie particles down enough to squeeze a little more tick from every tock, yet most experiments have only been able to demonstrate this on the smallest of scales.

The global dairy industry is changing. Among the disruptions is competition from food alternatives not produced using animals – including potential challenges posed by synthetic milk.

Synthetic milk does not require cows or other animals. It can have the same biochemical make up as animal milk, but is grown using an emerging biotechnology technique know as “precision fermentation” that produces biomass cultured from cells.

More than 80 percent of the world’s population regularly consume dairy products. There have been increasing calls to move beyond animal-based food systems to more sustainable forms of food production.

According to a new meta-analysis, gene variants associated with a person’s blood type may be linked to their risk of early stroke.

“Non-O blood types have previously been linked to a risk of early stroke, but the findings of our meta-analysis showed a stronger link between these blood types with early stroke compared to late stroke, and in linking risk mostly to blood type A,” said study author Braxton D. Mitchell, PhD, MPH, of University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Specifically, our meta-analysis suggests that gene variants tied to blood types A and O represent nearly all of those genetically linked with early stroke. People with these gene variants may be more likely to develop blood clots, which can lead to stroke.”

48 studies on genetics and ischemic stroke from North America, Europe, and Asia were reviewed in the meta-analysis. 16,927 people with stroke and 576,353 people who did not have a stroke were included in the studies. Of those with stroke, 5,825 people had early onset stroke and 9,269 people had late onset stroke. Early onset stroke was defined as an ischemic stroke occurring before age 60 and late-onset stroke was older than 60 years old.

A team of researchers from Stanford University has constructed the first synthetic microbiome model, built entirely from scratch and encompassing more than 100 different bacterial species. It’s hoped the achievement will revolutionize gut microbiome research by offering scientists a consistent working model for future experiments.

Trillions of microbes live inside our guts. Perhaps one of the most significant discoveries in medical science over recent decades has been how deeply these microbes influence our general health. From affecting how well drugs we consume work, to modulating our immune systems, the gut microbiome plays a powerful role in all aspects of our health.

It’s also mind-bendingly complex. No two people share exactly the same gut microbiome composition. And while researchers frequently home in on ways particular bacteria influence metabolic mechanisms, it has been difficult to translate these findings into actual clinical therapies for humans.

A treatment developed by a Japanese doctor and his team is helping women with premature menopause to give birth with their own eggs. Premature menopause is triggered by a malfunctioning of the ovaries and affects even those in their teens. The treatment involves activating dormant primordial follicles. We focus on the method, which has been described by TIME Magazine as a global breakthrough. We also introduce herbs that can alleviate symptoms such as those of menopause.

Astronomers report the detection of a new brown dwarf as part of the Ophiuchus Disk Survey Employing ALMA (ODISEA) program. The newfound object, designated SSTc2d J163134.1–24006, appears to be experiencing a quasi-spherical mass loss. The discovery was detailed in a paper published September 2 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

Brown dwarfs are intermediate objects between planets and stars, occupying the mass range between 13 and 80 Jupiter masses (0.012 and 0.076 solar masses). They can burn deuterium but are unable to burn regular hydrogen, which requires a minimum mass of at least 80 Jupiter masses and a core temperature of about 3 million K.

A team of astronomers led by Dary Ruiz-Rodriguez of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Charlottesville, Virginia, have investigated SSTc2d J163134.1–24006, initially identified as a faint stellar object, under the ODISEA project, which is dedicated to study the entire population of protoplanetary disks in the Ophiuchus Molecular Cloud. They found that SSTc2d J163134.1–24006 is most likely a brown dwarf with a mass of about 0.05 solar masses, and an elliptical shell of carbon monoxide (CO).