Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: Opioid use disorder affects genes associated with proinflammatory immune molecule encoding and genes associated with remodeling the extracellular matrix, suggesting the connection between neurons may be altered as a result of opioid use. Additionally, those with OUD have higher levels of microglia in the brain.

Source: Elsevier.

The epidemic of opioid abuse affects millions of people worldwide, but researchers know surprisingly little about the molecular changes caused by opioids in the human brain.

Despite strong support from the FAA, the airline industry, and aerospace companies, the U.S. Senate ceased funding the development of a supersonic airliner in 1971. Two years later, the FAA banned supersonic flight over land, a prohibition that remains to this day.

The Concorde went on to serve various destinations, including some in the United States, flying at supersonic speeds only over water. That continued until 2,003 when British Airways and Air France retired their fleets, together amounting to just 12 aircraft. (Fourteen production aircraft were manufactured, but one was scrapped in 1,994 and another crashed in 2000.)

While the Concorde successfully overcame the technical hurdles standing in the way of supersonic passenger service, it succumbed to economics: The cost of fuel and maintenance was especially high for these planes. A new generation of aeronautical engineers and entrepreneurs are, however, keen to once again take on the technical, environmental, and economic challenges.

Sylvia Todd, star of Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show, came up with the idea for the WaterColorBot because she wanted to create an art robot and enter it in the RoboGames competition. She approached us at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories about collaborating on the project, and we loved it.

Together we designed and built our first prototype in February, and had a nicely-working robot about a month later. As we realized that this project had a lot of appeal beyond just a one-off project, we started developing it into a kit. Sylvia exhibited her prototype at RoboGames (and won a Silver medal), and we also brought the WaterColorBot to Maker Faire, where thousands of people got to play with it.

Sylvia was also invited to the White House Science Fair in April, where she got to demonstrate the WaterColorBot for President Obama (pictures and media coverage here).

Circa 2016

EDavid stands for the Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Interactive Display.

Continue reading “Meet The Van Gogh Of The Robot World” »

Circa 2020

Rob and Nick Carter are artists whose work aims to synchronize technology and painting. They program industrial to autonomously paint portraits using acrylics and brushes.

Continue reading “Watch ROBOTS Painting PERFECT Portraits | Strictly Robots” »

Facebook and Google have both already laid thousands of miles of undersea internet cable together, and are in the process of laying thousands of miles more.

Google announced in June it would lay a cable linking the US East Coast to Argentina, and both companies announced in March they were funding two cables hooking up the US West Coast with Singapore and Indonesia.

Over the course of 2020 and early 2021, Google and Facebook both scrapped numerous projects linking the US with Hong Kong in response to political pressure with the US government, which cited security concerns.

It must be stressed an underlying condition to any 2FA alternative is the user themselves must have some level of active participation and responsibility.

At the same time, further work must be carried out by service providers, developers, and researchers to develop more accessible and secure authentication methods.

Essentially, these methods need to go beyond 2FA and towards a multi-factor authentication environment, where multiple methods of authentication are simultaneously deployed and combined as needed.

On August 9 2021, ESA/ NASA

Established in 1,958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

The Ophiuchus star-forming complex offers an analog for the formation of the solar system, including the sources of elements found in primitive meteorites.

A region of active star formation in the constellation Ophiuchus is giving astronomers new insights into the conditions in which our own solar system was born. In particular, a new study of the Ophiuchus star-forming complex shows how our solar system may have become enriched with short-lived radioactive elements.

Evidence of this enrichment process has been around since the 1970s, when scientists studying certain mineral inclusions in meteorites concluded that they were pristine remnants of the infant solar system and contained the decay products of short-lived radionuclides. These radioactive elements could have been blown onto the nascent solar system by a nearby exploding star (a supernova) or by the strong stellar winds from a type of massive star known as a Wolf-Rayet star.