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Aug 4, 2020

Airships Are No Longer a Relic of the Past; You Could Ride in One by 2023

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, government

To that end, Barry Prentice, who leads the Canadian company Buoyant Aircraft Systems International, hopes to use airships to transport pre-built structures for schools and housing to remote parts of Canada that lack good roads.

And earlier this year, French airship company Flying Whales (I mean, how can you not adore that name?) received $23 million in funding from the government of Quebec to build cargo-carrying Zeppelins.

Given our current pandemic-dominated reality, it’s hard to imagine a future of seamless global travel of any kind, much less on an airship. But that future will, thankfully, arrive (though when is anyone’s guess). As calls for climate action get louder and the costs associated with airships drop—as the cost of any new technology tends to do with time—we may find ourselves going retro and being ferried across the globe by giant helium-filled balloons.

Aug 4, 2020

Virgin Galactic Just Revealed a Next-Gen Mach 3 Aircraft, Rolls-Royce Deal

Posted by in category: transportation

Virgin Galactic has unveiled a new high-speed Mach 3 commercial aircraft and a new Rolls-Royce deal.

Aug 4, 2020

DeepMind hopes to teach AI to cooperate

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

In a new paper, researchers at DeepMind propose using the game Diplomacy as an environment for training reinforcement learning agents.

Aug 4, 2020

Casimir force used to control and manipulate objects

Posted by in categories: computing, mathematics, quantum physics

A collaboration between researchers from the University of Western Australia and the University of California Merced has provided a new way to measure tiny forces and use them to control objects.

The research, published today in Nature Physics, was jointly led by Professor Michael Tobar, from UWA’s School of Physics, Mathematics and Computing and Chief Investigator at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and Dr. Jacob Pate from the University of Merced.

Professor Tobar said that the result is a new way to manipulate and control in a non-contacting way, allowing enhanced sensitivity without adding loss.

Aug 4, 2020

Critically ill COVID-19 patients make quick recovery with treatment RLF-100

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

TEL AVIV — Critically ill COVID-19 patients recovered rapidly from respiratory failure after three days of treatment with RLF-100, a therapy granted fast-track designation in the United States, two drug companies said Sunday.

Geneva-based Relief Therapeutics Holdings AG RFLB.S has a patent for RLF-100, or aviptadil, a synthetic form of a natural peptide that protects the lung. US-Israeli NeuroRx Inc. partnered with Relief to develop the drug in the United States.

In June the US Food and Drug Administration granted fast-track designation to RLF-100 for treatment of respiratory distress in COVID-19.

Aug 4, 2020

Mystery radio signal sent to Earth from ‘closest ever point’ within Milky Way

Posted by in category: space

Scientists have traced mysterious radio signals detected on Earth to a dead star within our Milky Way galaxy.

The millisecond-long burst of radiation was emitted by a magnestar — a type of star with an extremely powerful magnetic field — roughly 14,000 light-years away, according to a study.

Known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), signals such as these have baffled scientists for years and typically originate from far beyond the Milky Way.

Aug 4, 2020

Dubai has taken 3D printing to a whole new level

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, sustainability

Building a sustainable future.


Record Holder.

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Aug 4, 2020

This AI Could Bring Us Computers That Can Write Their Own Software

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A new machine learning program called MISIM can figure out what a snippet of code is meant to do and offer up new code to make it faster or more efficient.

Aug 4, 2020

Israeli start-up develops ultra-portable oxygen generator

Posted by in category: futurism

“Oxygen tanks are not allowed in the battlefield because they risk exploding and are therefore considered too dangerous,” he said. “However, we have seen that in wars that Israel has fought, the complications related to the evacuation of injured soldiers without the possibility of providing them with oxygen in the meantime has caused several fatalities.”

The group started to work on a solution that would not only eliminate the dangers related to traditional oxygen tanks, but would also make it easier for the oxygen to be carried around.

The result is a device about 45×18 centimeters in size that produces oxygen without the need of a thermo-dynamic process.

Aug 4, 2020

Possible disappearance of a massive star in the low-metallicity galaxy PHL 293B

Posted by in category: cosmology

We investigate a suspected very massive star in one of the most metal-poor dwarf galaxies, PHL 293B. Excitingly, we find the sudden disappearance of the stellar signatures from our 2019 spectra, in particular the broad H lines with P Cygni profiles that have been associated with a massive luminous blue variable (LBV) star. Such features are absent from our spectra obtained in 2019 with the Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet- and Stable Spectroscopic Observation and X-shooter instruments of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. We compute radiative transfer models using cmfgen, which fit the observed spectrum of the LBV and are consistent with ground-based and archival Hubble Space Telescope photometry. Our models show that during 2001–2011, the LBV had a luminosity L* = 2.5–3.5 × 106 L, a mass-loss rate ˙ M = 0.005 − 0.020 M ⊙ yr−1, a wind velocity of 1000 km s−1, and effective and stellar temperatures of Teff = 6000–6800 and T* = 9500–15 000 K. These stellar properties indicate an eruptive state. We consider two main hypotheses for the absence of the broad emission components from the spectra obtained since 2011. One possibility is that we are seeing the end of an LBV eruption of a surviving star, with a mild drop in luminosity, a shift to hotter effective temperatures, and some dust obscuration. Alternatively, the LBV could have collapsed to a massive black hole without the production of a bright supernova.