Lifeboat Foundation

Children’s hospitals in parts of the U.S. are seeing a surge in a common respiratory illness that can cause severe breathing problems for babies.

RSV cases fell dramatically two years ago as the pandemic shut down schools, day cares and businesses. With restrictions easing in the summer of 2021, doctors saw an alarming increase in what is normally a fall and winter virus.

Now, it’s back again. And doctors are bracing for the possibility that RSV, flu and COVID-19 could combine to stress hospitals.

A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors. Graphic courtesy of Raytheon.

With Project Convergence, the Army has sought to further its integration into the Joint Force and change the way it fights, with an eye toward greater speed, range, and accuracy — particularly for long-range precision fires. Army leadership is looking particularly to close the gaps around sensor-generated intelligence — specifically how it’s sensed, made sense, and acted upon.

To that end, Raytheon Intelligence & Space (RI&S) was selected in June for a competitive, prototype phase in the continued development of the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. Awarded under an Other Transaction Agreement, TITAN seeks to turn battlefield intelligence into targeting information. A tactical ground station that finds and tracks threats to support long-range precision targeting, TITAN promises to bring together data from ground, air, and space sensors.

An international team of scientists has found toothed fish remains that date back 439 million years, which suggests that the ancestors of modern chondrichthyans (sharks and rays) and osteichthyans (ray-and lobe-finned fish) originated far earlier than previously believed.

The findings were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.

Continue reading “439-Million-Year-Old Fossil Teeth Overturn Long-Held Views About Evolution” »

How do you integrate the advantages of a benchtop laser that fills a room onto a semiconductor chip the size of a fingernail?

NASA will buying more Orion spacecraft, the Artemis program capsules taking astronauts to the moon, under a billion-dollar deal with Lockheed Martin.

Unnecessarily playing with nature.

The baby lambs didn’t just survive, they thrived. Within weeks in the artificial womb, they grew wool and gained weight. Are humans next?

Air conditioning is something you barely notice — until the power goes out, and it no longer works. But what if keeping cool didn’t require electricity at all?

A scientist has invented a material that reflects the sun’s rays off rooftops, and even absorbs heat from homes and buildings and radiates it away. And — get this — it is made from recyclable paper. The essential AC: Air conditioners are in 87% of homes in the United States, costing the homeowner $265 per year, on average. Some homes can easily spend twice that.

With global temperatures on the rise, no one is giving up their AC. More people are installing air conditioners than ever before, especially in developing countries where the middle class can finally afford them. 15 years ago, very few people in China’s urban regions had air conditioners; now, there are more AC units in China than there are homes.

Scientists can now “decode” people’s thoughts without even touching their heads, The Scientist reported.

Past mind-reading techniques relied on implanting electrodes deep in peoples’ brains. The new method, described in a report posted 29 Sept. to the preprint database bioRxiv, instead relies on a noninvasive brain scanning technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

FMRI tracks the flow of oxygenated blood through the brain, and because active brain cells need more energy and oxygen, this information provides an indirect measure of brain activity.

Chipmaker sees 3D version of the internet with ‘a whole bunch of robots’ as it expands factory-oriented tools.