Lifeboat Foundation

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) involves 23 countries, 15000 researchers, billions of dollars a year, and the biggest machine in the world: the Large Hadron Collider. Even with so much organizational and mechanical firepower behind it, though, CERN and the LHC are outgrowing their current computing infrastructure, demanding big shifts in how the world’s biggest physics experiment collects, stores and analyzes its data. At the 2021 EuroHPC Summit Week, Maria Girone, CTO of the CERN openlab, discussed how those shifts will be made.

The answer, of course: HPC.

The Large Hadron Collider – a massive particle accelerator – is capable of collecting data 40 million times per second from each of its 150 million sensors, adding up to a total possible data load of around a petabyte per second. This data describes whether a detector was hit by a particle, and if so, what kind and when.

Pugs, Ferraris, mountains, brunches, beaches, and babies — Instagram is full of them. In fact, it’s become one of the largest image databases on the planet over the last decade and the company’s owner, Facebook, is using this treasure trove to teach machines what’s in a photo.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it had built an artificial intelligence program that can “see” what it is looking at. It did this by feeding it over 1 billion public images from Instagram.

The “computer vision” program, nicknamed SEER, outperformed existing AI models in an object recognition test, Facebook said.

Researchers at Brown University have created a brain-computer interface (BCI) with 200 electrodes providing 48 megabits per second (Mbit/s) of neural signals.

China’s Tianwen-1 spacecraft has captured stunning images of Mars as a bright red sunlit crescent in deep space.

The photographs were separately taken over the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars with the medium resolution camera on Tianwen-1, China’s first interplanetary mission.

Earlier in March, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity arrived at a scenic rock formation nicknamed “Mont Mercou,” after a mountain in southeast France. The rover posed for a selfie in front of the Martian rock outcrop after collecting its 30th rock sample to date.

Buck Institute researchers have discovered and are developing a novel, non-invasive biomarker test that can be used to measure and track performance of senolytics: a class of drugs that selectively eliminate senescent cells. The discovery is expected to play a major role in efforts to develop treatments that would battle a myriad of chronic age-related conditions that range from arthritis to lung disease to Alzheimer’s disease and glaucoma. This biomarker is a unique signaling lipid metabolite, normally exclusively intracellular, but is released when senescent cells are forced to die. This metabolite is detectible in blood and urine, making non-invasive testing possible. With a growing list of senolytic drugs in development, detecting this metabolite via a companion test could verify performance of senolytic candidates.

“The list of age-related diseases definitively linked to cellular senescence keeps growing, as does the number of biotech companies racing to develop drugs to eliminate senescent cells,” said Buck professor Judith Campisi, Ph.D., senior scientist on the study. “While the field has never been more promising, the lack of a simple biomarker to measure and track efficacy of these treatments has been a hindrance to progress. We are excited to bring this new biomarker to the field and look forward to it being used in the clinic.”

People into aging/longevity research probably know all of what’s here already.

Aubrey de Grey has been the leading voice for antiaging, aging reversal and aging damage repair for over twenty years. He founded the SENS non-profit (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS). There have been six antiaging companies that have been directly spun out of SENS is researching the hardest problems related to fixing aging damage.

Repairing damage in five of the areas of aging are now highly active areas of biotech research.

Continue reading “How the World Defeats Aging by 2035” »

There’s no doubt that air taxis will be the next mobility solution that mankind is looking to implement. Actually, this process has been underway for a few years now.

Roughly 4 billion years ago, Mars looked a lot different than it does today. For starters, its atmosphere was thicker and warmer, and liquid water flowed across its surface. This included rivers, standing lakes, and even a deep ocean that covered much of the northern hemisphere. Evidence of this warm, watery past has been preserved all over the planet in the form of lakebeds, river valleys, and river deltas.

For some time, scientists have been trying to answer a simple question: where did all that water go? Did it escape into space after Mars lost its atmosphere, or retreat somewhere? According to new research from Caltech and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), between 30% and 90% of Mars’ water went underground. These findings contradict the widely-accepted theory that Mars lost its water to space over the course of eons.

The research was led by Eva Scheller, a Ph.D. candidate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She was joined by Caltech Prof. Bethany Ehlmann, who is also the associate director for the Keck Institute for Space Studies; Caltech Prof. Yuk Yung, a senior research scientist with NASA JPL; Caltech graduate student Danica Adams; and JPL research scientist Renyu Hu.