Lifeboat Foundation

Lunar traffic to pick up as NASA readies for robotic commercial moon deliveries.

NASA is working on various science instruments and technology experiments from the agency that will operate on the Moon once American companies on Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts deliver them to the lunar surface. Through CLPS flights, NASA is buying a complete commercial robotic lunar delivery service and does not provide launch services, own the lander or lead landing operations.

The agency has already purchased space on five upcoming commercial Moon missions and is expected to announce yet another task order award soon. The upcoming award keeps the agency on track for its goal of two CLPS deliveries per year as part of the Artemis program and will round out two deliveries per year 2021 through 2023.

NASA, in collaboration with other leading space agencies, aims to send its first human missions to Mars in the early 2030s, while companies like SpaceX may do so even earlier. Astronauts on Mars will need oxygen, water, food, and other consumables. These will need to be sourced from Mars, because importing them from Earth would be impractical in the long term. In Frontiers in Microbiology, scientists show for the first time that Anabaena cyanobacteria can be grown with only local gases, water, and other nutrients and at low pressure. This makes it much easier to develop sustainable biological life support systems.

Researchers believe this next generation of microchips could lead to computers and phones running thousands of times faster.

Astronomers are starting to understand why the dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way are aligned along a plane.

By 2030, artificial intelligence will handle some of today’s more routine chores with great efficiency and some non-routine chores with greater aplomb.

British scientists are developing ‘universal Covid jab’ that would effectively beat all variants of the virus in as little as a YEAR.

Nottingham University researchers are working with Oxford-based cancer vaccine firm Scancell (pictured, its chief medical officer) to create the universal vaccine.

Continue reading “UK scientists are developing ‘universal Covid jab’ to beat variants” »

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a soft, stretchy skin patch that can be worn on the neck to continuously track blood pressure and heart rate while measuring the wearer’s levels of glucose as well as lactate, alcohol or caffeine. It is the first wearable device that monitors cardiovascular signals and multiple biochemical levels in the human body at the same time.

Reservoir computing is a highly promising computational framework based on artificial recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Over the past few years, this framework was successfully applied to a variety of tasks, ranging from time-series predictions (i.e., stock market or weather forecasting), to robotic motion planning and speech recognition.

New EPFL/INRIA research shows for the first time that it is possible for our mobile devices to conduct machine learning as part of a distributed network, without giving big global tech companies access to our data.