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‘Clean oceans, clean space,’ is what was in Matthias Maurer’s mind while filling bags on the beach.


A German astronaut is showing his love for Earth during a few extra days on the planet’s surface before his first space mission.

Matthias Maurer, who is waiting with the rest of Crew-3 team for a delayed ride to the International Space Station, has spent part of his quarantine picking up trash on the Florida beach, within range of his SpaceX launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The mission, which will launch four astronauts to the station on a SpaceX Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket, will launch no earlier than Saturday (Nov. 6).

Ebola Vaccine: Information about Ervebo® | Clinicians | Ebola (Ebola Virus Disease) | CDC.


A safe and effective vaccine is an important tool to protect frontline workers and prevent the introduction and spread of Ebola in the United States.

Ebola virus is a zoonotic pathogen that causes severe hemorrhagic fever in humans, known as Ebola virus disease (EVD). There are four species of Ebola virus that have been known to cause disease in humans. Of these, species Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) is the most lethal, with case fatality rates of 70–90% if left untreated. EBOV is responsible for the majority of recorded EVD outbreaks. This includes the two largest EVD outbreaks in history, the 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak and the 2018 outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where over 32,000 people were infected, and more than 13,600 deaths were reported.

Importation of EVD to the United States from an epidemic region through an infected traveler is a recognized risk with the potential for spread to other people. During the 2014–2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, 11 people were treated for EVD in the U.S., and two of them died. Nine of these cases were imported into the U.S. Two were domestic healthcare workers who were infected while caring for the first travel-associated EVD case diagnosed in the U.S. Both healthcare workers recovered.

The interest of the US air force has been caught by the tech company Twelve’s project that allows the manufacture of a carbon-neutral aviation fuel called E-Jet. It can be used at any place, and it uses carbon dioxide from the air, water, and renewable energy.

Usually, the supply lines of energy, fuel, and water are the main targets for the opposing forces. The US Air Force stated that the attacks on fuel and water convoys in Afghanistan amounted to 30 percent of coalition casualties.

This process is being called “industrial photosynthesis” and makes use of the polymer electrolyte membrane electrolysis. It is a kind of inverted fuel cell, with a metal catalyst installed on a cathode to break down carbon dioxide and water into their component ions and then convert them into oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide.

Displacing Delta. Expect this to dominate globally in the coming year, if truly 10% more transmissible.


An offshoot of the Delta coronavirus variant which is slowly spreading throughout the UK is expected to be dominant within a matter of months, experts believe.

Known as AY.4.2, the sub-variant is thought to be at least 10 cent more transmissible than its predecessor, with analysis underway to determine what accounts for its increased infectiousness.

The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has said that early tests do not suggest that AY.4.2, which has been labelled a ‘Variant Under Investigation’, has acquired the ability to evade immunity generated by infection or injection.

DeepMind, part of Google, announces General AI breakthrough with a true learning AI. First, they built a dynamic environment (like a game) that can change it’s own layout — XLand. Then, they use Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning combined — Deep Reinforcement Learning — to create an AI the can learn without training at all or data about what it’s doing. The AI played 700,000 games in 4,000 unique worlds! The AI performed 200 BILLION training steps while performing 3.4 million UNIQUE (non-taught/programmed) tasks.

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The technology aims to deliver cost and power consumption improvements for deep learning use cases of inference, the companies said. This development follows NeuReality’s emergence from stealth earlier in February with an $8 million seed round to accelerate AI workloads at scale.

AI inference is a growing area of focus for enterprises, because it’s the part of AI where neural networks actually are applied in real application and yield results. IBM and NeuReality claim their partnership will allow the deployment of computer vision, recommendation systems, natural language processing, and other AI use cases in critical sectors like finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and smart cities. They also claim the agreement will accelerate deployments in today’s ever-growing AI use cases, which are already deployed in public and private cloud datacenters.

NeuReality has competition in Cast AI, a technology company offering a platform that “allows developers to deploy, manage, and cost-optimize applications in multiple clouds simultaneously.” Some other competitors include Comet.ml, Upright Project, OctoML, Deci, and DeepCube. However, this partnership with IBM will see NeuReality become the first start-up semiconductor product member of the IBM Research AI Hardware Center and a licensee of the Center’s low-precision high performance Digital AI Cores.

It would travel faster and farther than any man-made object we’ve made thus far.


When the famous Voyager twin spacecraft left Earth in the 1970s, their mission was originally meant to last only five years. However, the plutonium-powered spacecraft were still going strong when they reached Jupiter and Saturn, so NASA engineers decided they would try a flyby of Uranus and Neptune. But, even after that, the spacecraft still kept going and going — and they’re still at it almost 50 years later. So much so that both probes made history by officially exiting the bubble-shaped region created by the sun’s wind, known as the heliosphere, crossing into interstellar space.

Although they’re 14 billion and 11 billion miles, respectively, away from Earth, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are continuing to provide invaluable scientific data. For instance, sensors on the spacecraft are recording important information about the composition and levels of the gas, dust, and radiation that fills interstellar space — which is anything but empty, contrary to popular belief. This wouldn’t have been possible without these two daring spacecraft.

However, the Voyager twins can’t go on forever. Scientists estimate that the last instruments onboard the spacecraft will shut down by 2031 at the latest, if some malfunction doesn’t happen before then. This is why NASA wants a replacement — and this time, this new interstellar mission will be designed to run for a long time from the get-go. In fact, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) who have been tasked with designing the new mission, believe this Voyager successor could function for more than a century.

In the last few years, a class of materials called antiferroelectrics has been increasingly studied for its potential applications in modern computer memory devices. Research has shown that antiferroelectric-based memories might have greater energy efficiency and faster read and write speeds than conventional memories, among other appealing attributes. Further, the same compounds that can exhibit antiferroelectric behavior are already integrated into existing semiconductor chip manufacturing processes.

Now, a team led by Georgia Tech researchers has discovered unexpectedly familiar behavior in the antiferroelectric material known as zirconium dioxide, or zirconia. They show that as the microstructure of the material is reduced in size, it behaves similarly to much better understood materials known as ferroelectrics. The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials.

Miniaturization of circuits has played a key role in improving memory performance over the last fifty years. Knowing how the properties of an antiferroelectric change with shrinking size should enable the design of more effective memory components.