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Blog – Page 5921

SpaceX drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) departed Port Canaveral on January 1st, heading to sea on the first day of the year for SpaceX’s first launch of 2022.

With a launch manifest that’s never been more jam-packed and seemingly achievable, it’s no surprise that SpaceX is wasting no time kicking off what could be its third record-breaking year in a row. Barring delays, drone ship ASOG will arrive about 640 km (400 mi) downrange at its recovery site – just northeast of the Bahamas – a day or two before Falcon 9’s first launch and landing attempt of the year. Known as Starlink 4–5 (Group 4 Launch 5) and scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 4:49 pm EST (21:49 UTC), Thursday, January 6th, it will be SpaceX’s 34th dedicated Starlink launch since May 2019.

Perhaps more importantly, if the mission goes to plan and doesn’t have rideshare payloads, SpaceX will start 2022 having just launched its 1997th Starlink satellite, including two prototypes that came to be known as Tintin A and B and kicked off the constellation’s in-space hardware testing phase in February 2018. Excluding all prototypes, Starlink 4–5 will mark the launch of more than 1900 (1922) nominally operational Starlink satellites.

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Learn More.

Hashem Al-Ghaili posted an episode of Today I Read.

Two parallel universes were produced by the big bang.

Physicists have performed an experiment that suggests time in our Universe may be directed by gravity, not thermodynamics, and that the Big Bang could have created two parallel universes — our own, in which time runs forwards, and a mirror one where time runs backwards.

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What does 2022 have in store for AI in the enterprise? Will it be a robust year of world-altering developments and implementation, or will organizations struggle to gain appreciable value from an exceedingly complex technology?

In all likelihood, it will be a little of both. So as you chart a strategy for the coming year, keep an eye on what is really happening with AI right now and what remains on the drawing board.

If we look at Gartner’s AI Hype Cycle for 2021, it’s clear that the company has placed the majority of AI developments on the up-slope of the Innovation Trigger curve and at the Peak of Inflated Expectations. This includes everything from AI-driven automation and orchestration platforms to neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. This isn’t to say that these applications are destined to crash and burn, just that they’re still more hype than reality at the moment – and Gartner expects it will be two to five years before they become productive assets in the enterprise.

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Taking it easy as you get older? Wrong.

Message of new Lieberman study: ‘Because we evolved to be active throughout our lives, our bodies need physical activity to age well.’

Just about everyone knows that exercise is good for you. Some people can even rattle off reasons it keeps your muscles and joints strong, and how it fights off certain diseases. But how many people can tell you the story of why and how physical activity was built into human biology?

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An anonymous Canadian whistleblower from Vitalité Health Network, one of New Brunswick’s two health authorities, has said that more people are developing symptoms of a mysterious, degenerative neurological condition, according to The Guardian.

Speaking to the Guardian, an employee with Vitalité Health Network, one of the province’s two health authorities, said that suspected cases are growing in number and that young adults with no prior health triggers are developing a catalog of troubling symptoms, including rapid weight loss, insomnia, hallucinations, difficulty thinking and limited mobility.

Several new cases in New Brunswick involve caretakers of those afflicted, suggesting a possible environmental trigger.

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Decisions, decisions. All of us are constantly faced with conscious and unconscious choices. Not just about what to wear, what to eat or how to spend a weekend, but about which hand to use when picking up a pencil, or whether to shift our weight in a chair. To make even trivial decisions, our brains sift through a pile of “what ifs” and weigh the hypotheticals. Even for choices that seem automatic—jumping out of the way of a speeding car, for instance—the brain can very quickly extrapolate from past experiences to make predictions and guide behavior.

In a paper published in January 2020, in Cell, a team of researchers in California peered into the brains of rats on the cusp of making a decision and watched their neurons rapidly play out the competing choices available to them. The mechanism they described might underlie not just decision-making, but also animals’ ability to envision more abstract possibilities—something akin to imagination.

The group, led by the neuroscientist Loren Frank of the University of California, San Francisco, investigated the activity of cells in the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped brain region known to play crucial roles both in navigation and in the storage and retrieval of memories. They gave extra attention to neurons called place cells, nicknamed “the brain’s GPS” because they mentally map an animal’s location as it moves through space.

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