Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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While the world was distracted with the rampant spread of a novel coronavirus, 2020 also witnessed an explosion in another deadly pathogen that could pose a threat to global public health.

H5N8, a subtype of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAIV), was identified decades ago, but during 2020 a series of emerging and ongoing H5N8 outbreaks in avian populations across dozens of countries have led to the death or slaughter of millions of birds worldwide.

“The affected geographic regions have been expanding continuously, and at least 46 countries have reported highly pathogenic H5N8 AIV outbreaks,” virus researchers Weifeng Shi and George F. Gao write in a new perspective article in Science, warning of the dangers of H5N8 if we don’t closely monitor and contain this worrisome trend.

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Creating robots that can perform acrobatic movements such as flips or spinning jumps can be highly challenging. Typically, in fact, these robots require sophisticated hardware designs, motion planners and control algorithms.

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Massachusetts Amherst recently designed a new humanoid supported by an actuator-aware kino-dynamic motion planner and a landing controller. This design, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, could allow the humanoid robot to perform back flips and other acrobatic movements.

“In this work, we tried to come up with realistic control algorithm to make a real humanoid robot perform acrobatic behavior such as back/front/side-flip, spinning jump, and jump over an obstacle,” Donghyun Kim, one of the researchers who developed the robot’s software and controller, told TechXplore. “To do that, we first experimentally identified the actuator performance and then represent the primary limitations in our motion planner.”

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Seagate has been working toward developing a dual-actuator hard drive, meaning that the drive will contain two sets of independently controlled read/write heads. Now, after several years, the company has released its first functional dual-actuator hard drive, the Mach.2. Currently, only enterprises can purchase and use this product, meaning that at least for now, end users will have to wait their turn.

So far, Seagate has reported the Mach.2’s sequential, sustained transfer rate as up to 524MBps—over double the rate of a fast but generic rust disk, closer to the capacity seen in SATA SSD. In fact, this increased carries over into input/output as well, featuring 304 IOPS read / 384 IOPS write and only 4.16 ms average latency. By contrast, normal hard drives usually run at 100/150 IOPS with about the same average latency.

Of course, all of that extra capacity requires additional power. Even while idle, the Mach.2 runs at 7.2 W, while Seagate’s standard Ironwolf line runs at 5 W while idle. That said, it is a bit easier to measure the power specs of Mach.2 than Ironwolf, as the former’s power use can be determined using several random input/output scenarios, as opposed to Ironwolf, whose power is gauged from its “average operating power,” a metric undefined by the Seagate data sheet reference.

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For Ma, growing a more adultlike heart organoid, with all its chambers and structures, is the future of the field. But he doesn’t think this will happen in the next decade. For a complete heartlike organoid, he says, “there is still a long way to go.”

Self-organizing organoids resemble a 1-month-old embryo’s heart.

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Kelly and photographer Carlton Ward Jr. are featured in the April issue of National Geographic magazine. The article provides a glimpse into the life of the Florida panther, whose population once dwindled to below two dozen but has since rebounded to more than 200. Still, serious risks remain. In the past few weeks alone, two more endangered animals were killed after being struck by vehicles. Those deaths highlight a problem — as well as a success story for the cat the Cherokee once called “Lord of the forest.”

To capture panthers on camera, Kelly and Ward first had to find them. That’s not an easy task on Florida’s sandy soil, which makes them hard to track. You have to find really fresh tracks, Kelly said.

“First things first is identifying the track and knowing if it’s a panther or not. And then the real trick is following it,” he said. “So because they go so far, like in any given night, a panther might walk oh, a couple of miles. Maybe more. To actually follow panther tracks to find the panther itself — it’s way harder than it is for any of those African animals. Way harder.”

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The price of bitcoin jumped about 4% Monday afternoon after Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was having active discussions regarding the sustainability of the digital coin.

Bitcoin was trading around $38074, according to Coindesk, when at about 3:42 p.m. ET Musk posted on Twitter: “Spoke with North American Bitcoin miners. They committed to publish current & planned renewable usage & to ask miners WW to do so. Potentially promising.”

Within minutes, the price had shot up to more than $39500. Overall, the coin is up more than 17% in the last 24 hours.

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