Lifeboat Foundation

The S.S. Katherine Johnson will then safely fall to Earth.

A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft successfully undocked from the International Space Station Tuesday (June 29) at 12:25 p.m. EDT (1625 GMT), more than four months after it arrived in orbit.

The undocking aired live on NASA TV, with the spacecraft separating from the orbital outpost right on time, enabling the craft to begin a secondary mission before its planned fiery demise.

An international group of astronomers has created images with never-before-seen detail of a galaxy cluster with a black hole at its center, traveling at high speed along an intergalactic “road of matter.” The findings also support existing theories of the origins and evolution of the universe.

The concept that roads of thin gas connect clusters of galaxies across the universe has been difficult to prove until recently, because the matter in these ‘roads’ is so sparse it eluded the gaze of even the most sensitive instruments. Following the 2020 discovery of an intergalactic thread of gas at least 50 million light-years long, scientists have now developed images with an unprecedented level of detail of the Northern Clump—a cluster of galaxies found on this thread.

By combining imagery from various sources including CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope, SRG/eROSITA, XMM-Newton and Chandra satellites, and DECam optical data, the scientists could make out a large galaxy at the center of the clump, with a black hole at its center.

Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have engineered yeast used in baking, wine-making and brewing to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The bacteria has been modified to secrete an anti-inflammatory molecule in response to signs of gut inflammation and has proven effective in preclinical tests.

Our gut microbiome is increasingly implicated in everything from cancer to neurodegenerative disease but it is still unclear exactly how we can translate these novel findings into clinical treatments. Fecal transplants are probably the most primitive microbiome-modifying treatment we have developed, while probiotics simply rely on upping specific levels of naturally occurring bacteria.

Perhaps the most futurist microbiome therapy under investigation is the idea of genetically engineered probiotics. Here researchers modify bacteria to either eat up molecules we don’t want in our body or secrete molecules we know have positive therapeutic effects.

It can assist coders by generating and autocompleting code for their projects.

GitHub and OpenAI have launched a technical preview of a new AI tool called Copilot, which lives inside the Visual Studio Code editor and autocompletes code snippets.

Copilot does more than just parrot back code it’s seen before, according to GitHub. It instead analyzes the code you’ve already written and generates new matching code, including specific functions that were previously called. Examples on the project’s website include automatically writing the code to import tweets, draw a scatterplot, or grab a Goodreads rating.

Continue reading “GitHub and OpenAI launch a new AI tool that generates its own code” »

We’re thrilled to be part of the Hyundai Motor Group! And we’re celebrating with a dance to BTS’s “IONIQ: I’m On It.”

Read the behind the scenes story of the dance: http://blog.bostondynamics.com/all-together-now.
Check out the video of BTS meeting Spot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJZeMgqQMjA

I was at HudsonAlpha’s spinoff clinic for rare diseases, the Smith Family Clinic for Genomic Medicine. Most people don’t know this, but the second largest biomedical research campus in the USA and the fourth in the entire world is in Alabama. Long-read genome sequencing is essential for aging research because it is able to detect methylation and acetylation very conveniently, as well as major structural changes to the genome that are associated with both rare disease AND aging. This is an explanation of how long-read sequencing is able to fill in sequence gaps caused by Illumina short-read technology.

In 2020, Chromosome X and 8 were finished end-to-end with long-read sequencing, for the first time. And now in 2021, a complete gapless human genome is on the horizon. The Human Genome Project may finally, truly become complete.

February 3, 2021 (Huntsville, Ala.) – Researchers at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology used a new, cutting-edge genomic sequencing technology to help physicians make diagnoses for two pediatric patients who had been on long diagnostic journeys.

Continue reading “HudsonAlpha researchers use highly accurate long-read sequencing technology to help diagnose rare disease” »

A new AI dubbing technology syncs actors’ mouths with recorded dialogue to make the experience of watching a movie in an unknown language less jarring.

The challenge: If you want to watch a movie in a language you don’t understand, you have two choices: you can either read subtitles, which can be distracting, or you can watch a dubbed version of the film.

During the dubbing process, voice actors who do speak your language record all of the film’s dialogue in a sound booth. The original dialogue is then replaced with that audio.

Are there any individuals out there who, like myself, believe that our wonderful planet probably hosts the only lifeforms to be found anywhere? Should this ideed be the case, it places a colossal responsibility upon humankind. A responsibility, I would maintain, to not only share the gift of Earth-life with the silent, barren worlds which surround us but also to do our utmost to safeguard the splendid variety of life, in all of its myriad forms which inhabit our fecund and bountiful planet. If there are like minded folk out there please respond-I would like to link up with the view to working collaboratively. As this will be an extremely lengthy endeavour, probably lasting for many generations, my own area of interest is in popularising the subject among the young.

Life beyond might not exist — or we just don’t know how to find it.

Mix pair is “elusive missing piece of the family picture of compact object mergers.”

A long time ago, in two galaxies about 900 million light-years away, two black holes each gobbled up their neutron star companions, triggering gravitational waves that finally hit Earth in January 2020.

Discovered by an international team of astrophysicists including Northwestern University researchers, two events — detected just 10 days apart — mark the first-ever detection of a black hole merging with a neutron star. The findings will enable researchers to draw the first conclusions about the origins of these rare binary systems and how often they merge.