Lifeboat Foundation

Using AI and cameras to track and monitor the accumulation of litter in rivers.

Using AI to help people keep the earth clean! 😃

This automated approach can be used in any other city around the world, helping to reduce how much waste enters local waterways and reaches the ocean.

Continue reading “From Hobart, to London, to Dhaka: using cameras and AI to build an automatic litter detection system” »

Astronomers are searching for signs of a supermassive black hole in the galaxy cluster Abell 2261. Nearly all large galaxies contain central black holes, and the galaxy in the middle of Abell 2261 is expected to contain a particularly massive one.

Before the pandemic, the lab of Stanford University biochemist Peter S. Kim focused on developing vaccines for HIV, Ebola and pandemic influenza. But, within days of closing their campus lab space as part of COVID-19 precautions, they turned their attention to a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Although the coronavirus was outside the lab’s specific area of expertise, they and their collaborators have managed to construct and test a promising vaccine candidate.

“Our goal is to make a single-shot vaccine that does not require a cold-chain for storage or transport. If we’re successful at doing it well, it should be cheap too,” said Kim, who is the Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry. “The target population for our vaccine is low-and middle-income countries.”

Their vaccine, detailed in a paper published in ACS Central Science (“A Single Immunization with Spike-Functionalized Ferritin Vaccines Elicits Neutralizing Antibody Responses against SARS-CoV-2 in Mice”), contains nanoparticles studded with the same proteins that comprise the virus’s distinctive surface spikes.

The rover won’t land on the Red Planet until May.

China’s Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover are speeding toward the Red Planet and preparing to arrive on Feb. 10, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) has said.

Tianwen-1 has been in space for nearly 24 weeks and was around 81 million miles (130 million kilometers) from Earth and 5.15 million miles (8.3 million km) from Mars on Jan. 3 Beijing time, according to CNSA.

Basic science, practical engineering — and an attempt to focus on the most productive lines of effort.

When magnetic fields around a black hole reconnect, they can slow down plasma particles near the event horizon, which cause the black hole to lose energy when it swallows them.

The startup TuSimple is deploying tractor-trailers that drive themselves from pickup to delivery.

A new study theorizes that black holes made of collapsed universes originate dark matter, and our own universe may look like a black hole to outsiders.

(Inside Science) — It took years of painstaking work for Carlos Souza and his colleagues to map out every road in the Brazilian Amazon biome. Official maps of the 4.2 million-square-kilometer region only show roads built by federal and local governments. But by carefully tracing lines on satellite images, the researchers concluded in 2016 that the true length of all the roads combined was nearly 13 times higher.

“When we don’t have a good understanding of how much roadless areas we have on the landscape, we probably will misguide any conservation plans for that territory,” said Souza, a geographer at a Brazil-based environmental nonprofit organization called Imazon.

Now, Imazon researchers have built an artificial intelligence algorithm to find such roads automatically. Currently, the algorithm is reaching about 70% accuracy, which rises to 87%-90% with some additional automated processing, said Souza. Analysts then confirm potential roads by examining the satellite images. Souza presented the research last month at a virtual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.