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The Tokyo-based company will also achieve the first Japanese lunar landing.

Tokyo-based ispace is set to become the world’s first private company to land a lunar lander on the moon this December. “ispace, inc., a global lunar exploration company, released an updated launch schedule for its Mission 1 (M1) lunar lander, now scheduled to liftoff from SLC-40 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station no earlier than Dec. 11, 2022. The M1 lander, part of the HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket,” said a press statement on ispace’s website.

The mission was initially scheduled to launch on November 30, but the launch date was delayed.

ispace.

“ispace, inc., a global lunar exploration company, released an updated launch schedule for its Mission 1 (M1) lunar lander, now scheduled to liftoff from SLC-40 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station no earlier than Dec. 11, 2022. The M1 lander, part of the HAKUTO-R lunar exploration program, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket,” said a press statement on ispace’s website.

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It is working with CERN to push the boundaries of clean aerospace.

Airbus and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, have joined forces to launch Airbus UpNext, a project whose aim is to evaluate how superconductivity can contribute to the decarbonization of future aircraft systems, according to a press release by the aircraft manufacturer published last week.

It consists of a Super-Conductor for Aviation with Low Emissions (SCALE) demonstrator that aims to promote the adaptation and adoption of superconducting technologies in airborne electrical distribution systems.

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What alternative sex-determining system will we adapt?

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows how the spiny rat has evolved a new male-determining gene.

Usis/iStock.

The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost their Y chromosome and have lived to tell the tale.

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It has been described as “bringing your army right to the enemy.”

There’s a promising new therapy that makes the immune system kill bone marrow cancer cells. It has thus far been successful in as many as 73 percent of patients in two clinical trials, according to a report released by researchers from The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The novel therapy, called talquetamab, binds to both T cells and multiple myeloma cells and directs the T cells to exterminate multiple myeloma cells. It has been described as “bringing your army right to the enemy.”

Talquetamab was tested in phase 1 and phase 2 trials.

Luismmolina/iStock.

Talquetamab was tested in phase 1 and phase 2 trials. The study participants had all been previously treated with at least three different therapies without being able to achieve lasting remission.

Continue reading “‘New lease on life’: Bone marrow cancer therapy successful in 73% of patients” | >

Silicon Valley has been obsessed with ChatGPT since it launched on Nov. 30. The clever chatbot, created by Elon Musk-founded startup OpenAI, has racked up more than a million users in its first five days and is likely to report strong engagement as people dive deeper into the charms of its impressive AI.

You can chat with it for free at chat.openai.com and ask it anything it deems appropriate. It doesn’t have access to the internet and can only respond based on the data set it was trained on, but its answers can be quite imaginative.

The Tesla and SpaceX founder is always the hero in this chatbot sensation’s stories.

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Finding alien planets orbiting other stars is easy. Astronomers have found over 6,000 of them in just the last decade, but very few are considered even possibly habitable. Scientists have dozens of telescopes on the ground and in space that can find them and now even study their atmospheres for signs of life. Most are around small, dim red dwarf stars simply because current technology makes it difficult to study objects around bright Sun-like stars.

The next great objective in planetary science? Send a spacecraft to explore the surface of one of them, of course.

If we want to find Earth 2.0 we’re going to have to play the long game and visit star systems most like our own, says a white paper proposing a multi-century mission.

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Researchers used AI to analyze genes and discovered that aging is caused by unbalanced genes.

Researchers have discovered a breakthrough in what causes people to age. The research team, from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, found a previously unknown factor that leads to aging.

The research team used AI to analyze tissue samples.

Tylim/iStock.

The team discovered that the length of genes can account for most molecular-level changes that happen as animals get older. The study used artificial intelligence to assess data from various tissue that was collected from humans, rodents, and fish.

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More than three years ago, this editor sat down with Sam Altman for a small event in San Francisco soon after he’d left his role as the president of Y Combinator to become CEO of the AI company he co-founded in 2015 with Elon Musk and others, OpenAI.

At the time, Altman described OpenAI’s potential in language that sounded outlandish to some. Altman said, for example, that the opportunity with artificial general intelligence — machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human — is so great that if OpenAI managed to crack it, the outfit could “maybe capture the light cone of all future value in the universe.” He said that the company was “going to have to not release research” because it was so powerful. Asked if OpenAI was guilty of fear-mongering — Musk has repeatedly called all organizations developing AI to be regulated — Altman talked about the dangers of not thinking about “societal consequences” when “you’re building something on an exponential curve.”

The audience laughed at various points of the conversation, not certain how seriously to take Altman. No one is laughing now, however. While machines are not yet as intelligent as people, the tech that OpenAI has since released is taking many aback (including Musk), with some critics fearful that it could be our undoing, especially with more sophisticated tech reportedly coming soon.

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Microsoft today announced that it acquired Lumenisity, a U.K.-based startup developing “hollow core fiber (HCF)” technologies primarily for data centers and ISPs. Microsoft says that the purchase, the terms of which weren’t disclosed, will “expand [its] ability to further optimize its global cloud infrastructure” and “serve Microsoft’s cloud platform and services customers with strict latency and security requirements.”

HCF cables fundamentally combine optical fiber and coaxial cable. They’ve been around since the ’90s, but what Lumenisity brings to the table is a proprietary design with an air-filled center channel surrounded by a ring of glass tubes. The idea is that light can travel faster through air than glass; in a trial with Comcast in April, a single strand of Lumenisity HCF was reportedly able to deliver traffic rates ranging from 10 Gbps to 400 Gbps.

“HCF can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government,” Girish Bablani, CVP of Microsoft’s Azure Core business, wrote in a blog post. “For the public sector, HCF could provide enhanced security and intrusion detection for federal and local governments across the globe. In healthcare, because HCF can accommodate the size and volume of large data sets, it could help accelerate medical image retrieval, facilitating providers’ ability to ingest, persist and share medical imaging data in the cloud. And with the rise of the digital economy, HCF could help international financial institutions seeking fast, secure transactions across a broad geographic region.”

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It’s proving tough to reign in systems like ChatGPT

Did a human.

Did a human write that, or ChatGPT? It can be hard to tell — perhaps too hard, its creator OpenAI thinks, which is why it is working on a way to “watermark” AI-generated content.

In a lecture at the University of Austin, computer science professor Scott Aaronson, currently a guest researcher at OpenAI, revealed that OpenAI is developing a tool for “statistically watermarking the outputs of a text [AI system].” Whenever a system — say, ChatGPT — generates text, the tool would embed an “unnoticeable secret signal” indicating where the text came from.

OpenAI engineer Hendrik Kirchner built a working prototype, Aaronson says, and the hope is to build it into future OpenAI-developed systems.

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