Lifeboat Foundation

When the four-decades-old Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft entered interstellar space in 2012 and 2018, respectively, scientists celebrated. These plucky spacecraft had already traveled 120 times the distance from the Earth to the sun to reach the boundary of the heliosphere, the bubble encompassing our solar system that’s affected by the solar wind. The Voyagers discovered the edge of the bubble but left scientists with many questions about how our Sun interacts with the local interstellar medium. The twin Voyagers’ instruments provide limited data, leaving critical gaps in our understanding of this region.

NASA and its partners are now planning for the next spacecraft, currently called the Interstellar Probe, to travel much deeper into interstellar space, 1000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun, with the hope of learning more about how our home heliosphere formed and how it evolves.

“The Interstellar Probe will go to the unknown local interstellar space, where humanity has never reached before,” says Elena Provornikova, the Interstellar Probe heliophysics lead from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland. “For the first time, we will take a picture of our vast heliosphere from the outside to see what our solar system home looks like.”

The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out from the Space Station.

The winter months in the San Francisco Bay area offer a reprieve from the typically foggy summer days that shroud the city and water beneath a layer of low clouds. On this clear December day, an astronaut onboard the International Space Station shot this photograph of the area’s mixture of dense urban development and preserved natural spaces.

The Bay Area has several famous landmarks that stand out to astronauts. The Golden Gate Bridge is part of Route 101, the longest highway in California; it connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge crosses over and tunnels through Yerba Buena Island. Both bridges stand high enough to allow large ships to pass under on the way to various docks, piers, and shipyards around the Bay.

Two-photon photoemission studies electrons deep in sample.

Virtual meetings that are a bit more meeting-like.

Zoom is rolling out a video background feature called Immersive View that could make video calls feel a bit more like an office meeting — or at least look a lot more like one. Zoom announced the feature last year at its Zoomtopia conference, but now it’s actually available for Free and Pro accounts attending meetings and webinars with up to 25 participants.

Immersive View builds on the virtual background features Zoom already has, but focuses on actually placing meeting attendees in a realistic-looking location, rather than just switching out a flat background. Meeting hosts can enable Immersive View from the same menu where you can find Speaker View and Gallery View; from there, Zoom will automatically place attendees in a variety of built-in virtual scenes like a board room or auditorium, or the meeting host can manually place them themselves.

Continue reading “Zoom’s Immersive View could make video calls feel a bit more in-person” »

CEO of Turn. Bio at 3:40 talking about getting product to market in a few years rather than a decade.

#ERA #sebastiano #turnbio #krammer #stanford #healthspan #aging #longevity.
Ms. Anja Krammer, CEO of Turn Biotechnologies talks about the initial targets for ERA, the time line for clinical trials and FDA approval.
Turn Bio was co-founded by Dr. Vittorio Sebastiano to develop and market the Epigenetic Reprogramming of Aging technology that came out of his lab in Stanford University.
Ms. Krammer is a veteran of F500 healthcare and technology companies and co-founder of three Silicon Valley start ups. She is an entrepreneur who has built biotech, pharmaceutical and consumer businesses by assembling high-performance, results-driven teams and a counsellor to multiple enterprises, who has served on boards of public and private companies, industry organizations and foundation.

Continue reading “Clinical Trial Target & Timeline for Aging Diseases | Ms. Anja Krammer” »

A person can weed about one acre of crops a day. This smart robot can weed 20.

Carbon Robotics has unveiled the third-generation of its Autonomous Weeder, a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then destroys them with high-power lasers.

The weedkiller challenge: Weeds compete with plants for space, sunlight, and soil nutrients. They can also make it easier for insect pests to harm crops, so weed control is a top concern for farmers.

Continue reading “Farming Robot Kills 100,000 Weeds per Hour With Lasers” »

Artificial intelligence is helping humans make new kinds of art. It is more likely to emerge as a collaborator than a competitor for those working in creative industries. Film supported by Mishcon de Reya.

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Continue reading “How AI is transforming the creative industries | The Economist” »

The next era of astronomy will be defined by a wider view of the cosmos.

The next era of our investigation of the cosmos is about to be kick-started by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a ground-based telescope currently under construction on the El Penón peak of Cerro Pachón in northern Chile. The observatory is a federal project run by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The new observatory — named in honor of astronomer Vera Rubin — is scheduled to begin operations in October 2023, according to a statement published on the Rubin Observatory website. When it’s up and running, Rubin will allow astronomers to consider some of the universe’s most pressing mysteries.

NASA has never flown its own astronauts to and from space for a mission this long. Now SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship must bring them back to Earth.