Lifeboat Foundation

Sir David Attenborough confronts viewers with some of the most shocking images of his 66-year BBC career as he outlines how animals are facing mass extinction because of humans.

Upsetting scenes in his new series A Perfect Planet, on TV in Britain now and airing on Channel 9 later this year, show a parched and psychologically damaged baby elephant – its adult relatives killed by extreme droughts – cry out as rescuers squirt water into its mouth.

Continue reading “David Attenborough’s grim extinction warning” »

Circa 2020

Unreal and beyond most of our trippiest dreams, the city of Dubai is a living, breathing sci-fi movie—firefighters in jetpacks, anyone? Now try adding an entire Martian city concept to that.

The United Arab Emirates is on the same wavelength as Elon Musk when it comes to colonizing Mars. They want an entire human population on the Red Planet within the next century. Architects from Bjarke Ingels Group were asked to design Mars Science City, a prototype for what is going to turn into a hyper-futuristic lab for the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC), which will keep developing space tech that will allow humans to stay alive on a frozen planet almost 80 million miles (40 on a good day) from Earth.

Researchers at Google claim to have trained a natural language model containing over a trillion parameters.

The future is someone else’s problem. Tomorrow is just another day.

This is all well and good to think, but if we want to live a long, healthy life, then we ALL need to work to make tomorrow a better day…

Continue reading “Making The Future Better Together” »

Chipmakers often place orders with contract manufacturers instead of fabricating chips in-house. It takes time to manufacture semiconductors while reconfiguring lines to accommodate varying specifications, making it difficult to turn out different chips at the same time.

TOKYO — The auto industry is facing a severe lack of semiconductors amid rising use of the chips in other products, like smartphones and communication base stations.

This has forced Germany’s Volkswagen as well as Japanese makers like Honda and Nissan to reduce production.

Continue reading “Global chip shortage threatens automakers worldwide” »

Sierra Nevada, the spaceship’s maker, is also building the LIFE space habitat.

Delays, many related to COVID, have pushed the first flight of the Dream Chaser space plane to 2022.

China has hinted before that it would like to send missions to the outer planets. Chinese scientists, working with European collaborators, are now solidifying plans for two distinct Jupiter mission concepts, one of which will likely move forward. Both seek to unravel mysteries behind the planet’s origins and workings using a main spacecraft and one or more smaller vehicles.

The competing missions are called the Jupiter Callisto Orbiter and the Jupiter System Observer, or JCO and JSO, respectively. Both would launch in 2029 and arrive in 2035 after one Venus flyby and two Earth flybys. JCO and JSO would study the size, mass, and composition of Jupiter’s irregular satellites—those captured by Jupiter rather than formed in orbit, and often in distant, elliptical and even retrograde orbits—complementing science conducted by NASA’s Europa Clipper and Lucy missions, as well as the European Space Agency’s JUICE mission.

Both JCO and JSO would possibly include CubeSats with particle and field detector payloads to perform the first multi-point study of Jupiter’s magnetic field.

Science Mission Directorate

What is dark energy? More is unknown than is known — we know how much there is, and we know some of its properties; other than that, dark energy is a mystery — but an important one. Roughly 70% of the Universe is made of dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest — everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be called “normal” matter since it is a small fraction of the Universe!

Researchers have found a simple way to eliminate almost all sequencing errors produced by a widely used portable DNA sequencer, potentially enabling scientists working outside the lab to study and track microorganisms like the SARS-CoV-2 virus more efficiently.

Using special molecular tags, the team was able to reduce the five-to-15 percent error rate of Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ MinION device to less than 0.005 percent—even when sequencing many long stretches of DNA at a time.

“The MinION has revolutionized the field of genomics by freeing DNA sequencing from the confines of large laboratories,” says Ryan Ziels, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia and the co-lead author of the study, which was published this week in Nature Methods. “But until now, researchers haven’t been able to rely on the device in many settings because of its fairly high out-of-the-box error rate.”