Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, has announced that his space internet project is ready for public use. The statement comes after SpaceX launched 60 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit last week, bringing the total number to almost 800.

Eventually, SpaceX plans to launch tens of thousands of Starlink satellites to create a blanket around the Earth capable of beaming high-speed broadband internet to 99% of the inhabited world.

Starlink’s limited beta hooked up a reservation in rural Washington state.

The OEC need some VR sets next year.

Star Trek’s holodeck, that lets people physically interact with a virtual world could be a step closer thanks to a ‘universal law of touch’, discovered by British scientists.

Continue reading “VR objects you FEEL are a step closer thanks to new ‘law of touch’” »

Mankind has mastered the art of flight for well over a century, and the concept has become so normalized that we tend to take for granted this amazing accomplishment, but as advanced as modern airplanes are, we are still not much closer to developing a vehicle that can travel as well on land as it can in the air. The concept of a flying car has haunted engineers for decades, and companies such as Hyundai have dedicated some serious research and development to make this dream come true. But now an Italian upstart named Firenze has come up with a new and exciting concept that will be powered by the same electric motors that power the Tesla Model S.

This week, NASA’s Planetary Science Division (PSD) hosted a community workshop at their headquarters in Washington, DC. Known as the “Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop”, this event ran from February 27th to March 1st, and saw scientists and researchers from all over the world descend on the capitol to attend panel discussions, presentations, and talks about the future of space exploration.

One of the more intriguing presentations took place on Wednesday, March 1st, where the exploration of Mars by human astronauts was discussed. In the course of the talk, which was titled “A Future Mars Environment for Science and Exploration”, Director Jim Green discussed how deploying a magnetic shield could enhance Mars’ atmosphere and facilitate crewed missions there in the future.

The current scientific consensus is that, like Earth, Mars once had a magnetic field that protected its atmosphere. Roughly 4.2 billion years ago, this planet’s magnetic field suddenly disappeared, which caused Mars’ atmosphere to slowly be lost to space. Over the course of the next 500 million years, Mars went from being a warmer, wetter environment to the cold, uninhabitable place we know today.

The CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing tool is one of the most promising approaches to advancing treatments of genetic diseases—including cancer—an area of research where progress is constantly being made. Now, the Molecular Cytogenetics Unit led by Sandra Rodríguez-Perales at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has taken a step forward by effectively applying this technology to eliminate so-called fusion genes, which in the future could open the door to the development of cancer therapies that specifically destroy tumors without affecting healthy cells. The paper is published in Nature Communications.

Fusion genes are the abnormal result of an incorrect joining of DNA fragments that come from two different genes, an event that occurs by accident during the process of cell division. If the cell cannot benefit from this error, it will die and the fusion genes will be eliminated. But when the error results in a reproductive or survival advantage, the carrier cell will multiply and the fusion genes and the proteins they encode thus become an event triggering tumor formation. “Many chromosomal rearrangements and the fusion genes they produce are at the origin of childhood sarcomas and leukaemias,” explains Sandra Rodríguez-Perales, lead co-author of the study now published by the CNIO. Fusion genes are also found in among others prostate, breast, lung and brain tumors: in total, in up to 20% of all cancers.

Because they are only present in tumor cells, fusion genes attract a great deal of interest among the scientific community because they are highly specific therapeutic targets, and attacking them only affects the tumor and has no effect on healthy cells.

Our world is changing faster than ever, and technologies like artificial intelligence are transforming our workplaces. Here we look at what that means for future leaders and which leadership skills are becoming essential today.

The blockchain revolution, online gaming and virtual reality are powerful new technologies that promise to change our online experience. After summarizing advances in these hot technologies, we use the collective intelligence of our TechCast Experts to forecast the coming Internet that is likely to emerge from their application.

Here’s what learned:

Security May Arrive About 2027 We found a sharp division of opinion, with roughly half of our experts thinking there is little or no chance that the Internet would become secure — and the other half thinks there is about a 60% probability that blockchain and quantum cryptography will solve the problem at about 2027. After noting the success of Gilder’s previous forecasts, we tend to accept those who agree with Gilder.

Decentralization Likely About 2028–2030 We find some consensus around a 60% Probability and Most Likely Year About 2028–2030. The critical technologies are thought to focus on blockchain, but quantum, AI, biometrics and the Internet of things (IoT) also thought to offer localizing capabilities.

Continue reading “The Coming Internet: Secure, Decentralized and Immersive” »

This is really exciting.