Lifeboat Foundation

Great new, lively episode with historian and author Jeff Shesol on the earliest and arguably darkest days of the Cold War and how they were inexorably intertwined with America’s space race with the former Soviet Union. The cast of characters includes Eisenhower, JFK, Khrushchev, and John Glenn. Please have a listen.

Historian and former Clinton presidential speechwriter Jeff Shesol chats about his new book, “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy and the New Battleground of the Cold War” just out from W.W. Norton. Shesol makes the case that the Cold War and the Space Race were inextricably intertwined in ways that are rarely appreciated in most conventional histories of the subjects. Shesol gives us a great inside look into this mostly-forgotten early era.

Continue reading “Episode 53 --- New Book Takes Unique Angle On The Cold War, John Glenn, JFK and America’s Early Space Race With the Soviet Union” »

The Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) researchers announced this week a natural language processing model called WuDao 2.0 that, per the South China Morning Post, is more advanced than similar models developed by OpenAI and Google.

The report said WuDao 2.0 uses 1.75 trillion parameters to “simulate conversational speech, write poems, understand pictures and even generate recipes.” The models developed by OpenAI and Google are supposed to do similar things, but they use fewer parameters to do so, which means WuDao 2.0 is likely better at those tasks.

Doctors are reporting improved survival in men with advanced prostate cancer from an experimental drug that delivers radiation directly to tumor cells. Few such drugs are approved now, but the approach may become a new way to treat patients with other hard-to-reach or inoperable cancers.

On Wednesday, the Houston-based firm organizing the mission announced it had reached an agreement with SpaceX to fly three additional private crew missions to the International Space Station. The missions will run through to 2023.

It’s an exciting chance for regular people to go to space. But beyond expanding space tourism, Axiom Space’s missions could serve another ambitious idea — to develop a successor to the International Space Station.

In the cold, dense medium of a helium-3 superfluid, scientists recently made an unexpected discovery. A foreign object travelling through the medium could exceed a critical speed limit without breaking the fragile superfluid itself.

As this contradicts our understanding of superfluidity, it presented quite a puzzle — but now, by recreating and studying the phenomenon, physicists have figured out how it happens. Particles in the superfluid stick to the object, shielding it from interacting with the bulk superfluid, thus preventing the superfluid’s breakdown.

“Superfluid helium-3 feels like a vacuum to a rod moving through it, although it is a relatively dense liquid. There is no resistance, none at all,” said physicist Samuli Autti of Lancaster University in the UK. “I find this very intriguing.”

Scientists create a superfluid with negative mass that accelerates backwards.

Biobots could help us with new organs! 😃

Computer scientists and biologists have teamed up to create a creature heretofore unseen on Earth: a living robot. Made from the cells of frogs and designed by artificial intelligence, they’re called xenobots, and they may soon revolutionize everything from how we fight pollution to organ transplants.

Continue reading “Biological Robots May Soon Build You a Better Heart” »

For that, they will need the quantum equivalent of optical repeaters, the components of today’s telecommunications networks that keep light signals strong across thousands of kilometers of optical fiber. Several teams have already demonstrated key elements of quantum repeaters and say they’re well on their way to building extended networks. “We’ve solved all the scientific problems,” says Mikhail Lukin, a physicist at Harvard University. “I’m extremely optimistic that on the scale of 5 to 10 years… we’ll have continental-scale network prototypes.”

Advance could precisely link telescopes, yield hypersecure banking and elections, and make quantum computing possible from anywhere.

All cells on Earth are made of phospholipid membranes. Now astronomers have found the component molecules in interstellar space.

One potential explanation is that the Earth was seeded from space with the building blocks for life. The idea is that space is filled with clouds of gas and dust that contain all the organic molecules necessary for life.

Indeed, astronomers have observed these buildings blocks in interstellar gas clouds. They can see amino acids, the precursors of proteins and the machinery of life. They can also see the precursors of ribonucleotides, molecules that can store information in the form of DNA.

Continue reading “First evidence of cell membrane molecules in space” »