Lifeboat Foundation

A NASA spacecraft named Lucy rocketed into the sky with diamonds Saturday on a 12-year quest to explore eight asteroids.

A team of researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Touchstone Diabetes Center have successfully used CRISPR gene editing to turn fat cells normally used for storage into energy-burning cells.

“It’s like flipping a switch. We removed the ‘brake’ on the energy burning pathway in fat cells by engineering a mutation that disrupts the interaction between a single pair of proteins,” said study leader Rana Gupta, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Internal Medicine. “Our research demonstrates that releasing this brake in fat cells can potentially help make existing diabetes medications much more effective.”

The research at UT Southwestern, ranked as one of the nation’s top 25 hospitals for diabetes and endocrinology care, is published in Genes and Development and supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Circa 2017

Lightning is one of Earth’s most energetic events, but there’s much more to it than just a flashing fork and the rumble of thunder. Lightning strikes have been known to generate gamma rays, and now a team of Japanese researchers has found that those bursts can create photonuclear reactions in the atmosphere, resulting in the production – and annihilation – of antimatter.

Bursts of gamma rays from lightning were first detected in 1,992 thanks to NASA’s Compton Gamma-ray Observatory. Since then, these Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes (TGF) have been studied intently, and the new research out of Kyoto University has found an unexpected cause of some of the signals.

Continue reading “Gamma rays from lightning found to create antimatter in the air” »

#spooky o.o…

Users have been able to create some frightening and uncanny images of cosmic horrors and eldritch gods using text-to-image AI.

Deep North, a Foster City, California-based startup applying computer vision to security camera footage, today announced that it raised $16.7 million in a Series A-1 round. Led by Celesta Capital and Yobi Partners, with participation from Conviction Investment Partners, Deep North plans to use the funds to make hires and expand its services “at scale,” according to CEO Rohan Sanil.

Deep North, previously known as Vmaxx, claims its platform can help brick-and-mortar retailers “embrace digital” and protect against COVID-19 by retrofitting security systems to track purchases and ensure compliance with masking rules. But the company’s system, which relies on algorithms with potential flaws, raises concerns about both privacy and bias.

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Nvidia announced today that Isaac, its developer toolbox for supporting AI-powered robotics, will deepen support of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The announcement is being made this morning at ROS World 2,021 a conference for developers, engineers, and hobbyists who work on ROS, a popular open-source framework that helps developers build and reuse code used for robotics applications.

Nvidia, which is trying to assert its lead as a supplier of processors for AI applications, announced a host of “performance perception” technologies that would be part of what it will now call Isaac ROS. This includes computer vision and AI/ML functionality in ROS-based applications to support things like autonomous robots.

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Fossils indicate a communal nesting ground and adults who foraged and took care of the young as a herd, scientists say.

To borrow a line from the movie “Jurassic Park:” Dinosaurs do move in herds. And a new study shows that the prehistoric creatures lived in herds much earlier than previously thought.

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A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time. A loping cheetah dashes across a rolling field, bounding over sudden gaps in the rugged terrain. The movement may look effortless, but getting a robot to move this way is an altogether different prospect.

In recent years, four-legged robots inspired by the movement of cheetahs and other animals have made great leaps forward, yet they still lag behind their mammalian counterparts when it comes to traveling across a landscape with rapid elevation changes.

Continue reading “One giant leap for the mini cheetah” »

Such planetary smashups are likely common in young solar systems, but they haven’t been directly observed.

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars.

Now astronomers at MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway, Cambridge University, and elsewhere have discovered evidence of a giant impact that occurred in a nearby star system, just 95 light years from Earth. The star, named HD 172,555 is about 23 million years old, and scientists have suspected that its dust bears traces of a recent collision.

Continue reading “Astronomers detect signs of an atmosphere stripped from a planet during giant impact” »