Lifeboat Foundation

Hot, dry rock deep underground could be used to heat water and produce electricity.

June 29 (Reuters) — Germany’s BioNTech (22UAy. DE), Pfizer’s (PFE.N) partner in COVID-19 vaccines, said the two companies would start tests on humans of next-generation shots that protect against a wide variety of coronaviruses in the second half of the year.

Their experimental work on shots that go beyond the current approach include T-cell-enhancing shots, designed to primarily protect against severe disease if the virus becomes more dangerous, and pan-coronavirus shots that protect against the broader family of viruses and its mutations.

In presentation slides posted on BioNTech’s website for its investor day, the German biotech firm said its aim was to “provide durable variant protection”.

In this podcast we meet the CEO and co-founder of First Light Fusion.

Text-to-image generation is the hot algorithmic process right now, with OpenAI’s Craiyon (formerly DALL-E mini) and Google’s Imagen AIs unleashing tidal waves of wonderfully weird procedurally generated art synthesized from human and computer imaginations. On Tuesday, Meta revealed that it too has developed an AI image generation engine, one that it hopes will help to build immersive worlds in the Metaverse and create high digital art.

A lot of work into creating an image based on just the phrase, “there’s a horse in the hospital,” when using a generation AI. First the phrase itself is fed through a transformer model, a neural network that parses the words of the sentence and develops a contextual understanding of their relationship to one another. Once it gets the gist of what the user is describing, the AI will synthesize a new image using a set of GANs (generative adversarial networks).

Continue reading “Meta’s ‘Make-A-Scene’ AI blends human and computer imagination into algorithmic art” »

AbstractAlpha particles with energies on the order of megaelectronvolts will be the main source of plasma heating in future magnetic confinement fusion react… See more.

Experiments at the Joint European Torus tokamak show improved thermal ion confinement in the presence of highly energetic ions and Alfvénic instabilities in the plasma.

Supplyve gives small independent retailers the technological tools to take control of their supply chains without spreadsheets.

Zap Energy said its experimental reactor core was ready for a milestone test. Skeptics routinely question whether the technology is currently possible.

Zap Energy said its experimental reactor core was ready for a milestone test. Skeptics routinely question whether the technology is currently possible.

A strain-sensing smart skin developed at Rice University that uses very small structures, carbon nanotubes, to monitor and detect damage in large structures is ready for prime time.

The ‘strain paint’ first revealed by Rice in 2012 uses the fluorescent properties of nanotubes to show when a surface has been deformed by stress.

Continue reading “Nanotube-embedded coating detects threats from wear and tear in large structures” »

In the deep subsurface that plunges into the Earth for miles, microscopic organisms inhabit vast bedrock pores and veins. Belowground microorganisms, or microbes, comprise up to half of all living material on the planet and support the existence of all life forms up the food chain. They are essential for realizing an environmentally sustainable future and can change the chemical makeup of minerals, break down pollutants, and alter the composition of groundwater.

While the significance of bacteria and archaea is undeniable, the only evidence of their existence in the deep subsurface comes from traces of biological material that seep through mine walls, cave streams, and drill holes that tap into aquifers.

Many scientists have assumed that the composition of microbial communities in the deep subsurface is primarily shaped by local environmental pressures on microbial survival such as temperature, acidity, and oxygen concentration. This process, environmental selection, can take years to millennia to cause significant community-level changes in slow-growing communities like the subsurface.