Lifeboat Foundation

“It’s the stupidest thing ever,” Elon Musk said several years ago.

European Space Agency’s (ESA) director general has proposed the development of Europe’s first space-based solar power system to be constructed in 2025.

ESA, an intergovernmental conglomerate of 22 member states, will decide on the director’s plan in November this year, according to a report published in Ars Technica.

Continue reading “Europe is seriously considering a major investment in space-based solar power” »

A more long-term alternative to using steroids.

It is estimated that more than 250 million people globally suffer from asthma, which also causes hundreds of thousands of fatalities annually. Therefore, finding a cure for the condition could be life-changing for a large number of people.

Scientists have now developed a new potential long-term treatment for asthma. The method, which not only treats the symptoms of asthma but also targets one of its causes, functions by preventing the mobility of a certain kind of stem cell known as a pericyte.

Continue reading “This Asthma Vaccine Might Be Trialed in Humans in Near Future” »

The James Webb space telescope continues to dazzle. After releasing the telescope’s first images in July, NASA and the other agencies behind the new telescope have continued to monitor and observe new galaxies and celestial phenomena. Now, the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Study (CEERS) has released James Webb’s largest image to date.

The new image is a mosaic that includes multiple pieces of data put together by people working on CEERS. The team is made up of 105 scientists and 19 investigators stationed across 28 institutions in the world. They captured all of the data using the new telescope. Together they all make up James Webb’s largest image to date.

The data was gathered using James Webb’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), its Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), and its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Each part of the data was taken parallel to the others. Researchers then carefully stitched them together. The instruments capture data using wavelengths that aren’t visible to the naked eye. They then translated the data into visible images.

❤️ Check out Runway and try it for free here: https://runwayml.com/papers/

📝 The paper “3D Face Reconstruction with Dense Landmarks” is available here:
https://microsoft.github.io/DenseLandmarks/

Continue reading “Microsoft’s New AI: Virtual Humans Became Real! 🤯” »

Van der Waerden’s conjecture mystified mathematicians for 85 years. Its solution shows how polynomial roots relate to one another.

Burial sites in the Eastern Mediterranean from the period around 2000 BCE show evidence of outbreaks of disease that likely contributed to the fall of three great civilizations: the Minoan on the island of Crete, the Akkadian in what is Turkey today, and Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

The pathogens found in the DNA of old bones indicate significant outbreaks of typhoid fever and the plague. The emergence of widespread disease in this area of the world at that time may be related to climate change, or pressures from new waves of human migration coming from outside the region. But a paper published in Current Biology on July 25, 2022, shows widespread infections involving the bacterium Yersinia pestis, responsible for the many incidents of plague that occurred in ancient civilizations all the way to the era of Justinian 1st in the 6th century CE Eastern Roman Empire which modern scholars labelled Byzantine. Also found in burial sites is widespread evidence of Salmonella Enterica the cause of typhoid/enteric fever.

This evidence coincides with a period of major geopolitical transformation from 2,290 to 1909 BCE. During this time the Old Kingdom, the Akkadian Empire, and the Middle Minoan civilization were all disrupted. The periods are associated with societal and population declines throughout much of the Eastern Mediterranean. Did these depopulating diseases come from elsewhere brought in by migration and invasion? Were there environmental factors such as a change in the climate? Was there degradation of agricultural lands leading to famine, and a general weakening of the local population?

Last week, a team of British divers discovered the remains of a thousand-ton, 316-foot U.S. Navy warship that hasn’t been seen in over a century. Dana Jacobson reports.

A “bio-battery” made from genetically engineered bacteria could store excess renewable energy and release it as needed.

However, AI functionalities on these tiny edge devices are limited by the energy provided by a battery. Therefore, improving energy efficiency is crucial. In today’s AI chips, data processing and data storage happen at separate places – a compute unit and a memory unit. The frequent data movement between these units consumes most of the energy during AI processing, so reducing the data movement is the key to addressing the energy issue.

Stanford University engineers have come up with a potential solution: a novel resistive random-access memory (RRAM) chip that does the AI processing within the memory itself, thereby eliminating the separation between the compute and memory units. Their “compute-in-memory” (CIM) chip, called NeuRRAM, is about the size of a fingertip and does more work with limited battery power than what current chips can do.

“Having those calculations done on the chip instead of sending information to and from the cloud could enable faster, more secure, cheaper, and more scalable AI going into the future, and give more people access to AI power,” said H.-S Philip Wong, the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering.