@AlexGatopoulos looks at how hypersonic missiles are emerging as a key tool in the race to dominate the next frontier — outer space.
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People who reach a very old age may have their genes to thank. Genetic variants that help to prevent DNA mutations and repair any that do occur have been found in supercentenarians and semi-supercentenarians – people who reach the ages of 110 and 105, respectively.
“DNA repair mechanisms are extremely efficient in these people,” says Claudio Franceschi at the University of Bologna in Italy. “It is one of the most important basic mechanisms for extending lifespan.”
AI is fundamental to many products and services today, but its hunger for data and computing cycles is bottomless. Lightmatter plans to leapfrog Moore’s law with its ultra-fast photonic chips specialized for AI work, and with a new $80 million round, the company is poised to take its light-powered computing to market.
We first covered Lightmatter in 2018, when the founders were fresh out of MIT and had raised $11 million to prove that their idea of photonic computing was as valuable as they claimed. They spent the next three years and change building and refining the tech — and running into all the hurdles that hardware startups and technical founders tend to find.
For a full breakdown of what the company’s tech does, read that feature — the essentials haven’t changed.
A new method is cheaper and more environmentally friendly than traditional processes.
Teresa Ambrosio, University of Nottingham.
Maybe not lol.
If we ever found life on another planet it would probably be the biggest news of the millennium, and you’d expect the evidence to be published in a highly prestigious journal like Nature or Science. So, when a study claiming that mushrooms are growing on Mars appears in an obscure and largely discredited publication, you have to be more than a little skeptical.
Earlier this week, a preprint of a new study appeared online, bearing the eyebrow-raising title Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images. Unfortunately, the paper is due for publication in the journal Advances in Microbiology, which is part of the Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP) portfolio. Given that SCIRP has a history of plagiarizing articles from other journals, it’s pretty difficult to take any of its content seriously.
The study itself comprises an analysis of images taken by NASA’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, which have been carrying out observations on the Red Planet, in addition to photographs taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using red circles and arrows to highlight certain features, the study authors point out a series of structures that look a lot like rocks but also maybe a tiny bit like puffball mushrooms.
That’s good funding.
Berlin, Gerrmany — Michael Greve, founder of the Forever Healthy Foundation and owner of Kizoo Technology Ventures, announced today that he will make available an additional €300 million to be invested in rejuvenation biotech.
The funds, to be deployed via Kizoo, will be used to create and support more startups in the rejuvenation space. They will also allow Kizoo to maintain a strong commitment to its key startups during follow-up rounds and to advance the therapies from clinical development to public availability.
With this €300 million commitment, Michael Greve and Kizoo double down on their mission to accelerate the advent of rejuvenation biotechnology by doing lighthouse investments in entirely new, repair-based approaches that treat the root causes of aging and thus overcome age-related diseases. Through the creation of successful companies, they seek to inspire scientists, investors, and the general public by demonstrating that human rejuvenation is not science fiction anymore and that the resulting therapies are affordable and uncomplicated.
Tomographic 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that uses light to create three-dimensional objects. A projector beams light at a rotating vial containing photocurable resin, and within seconds the desired shape forms inside the vial. The light projections needed to solidify specific 3D regions of the polymer are calculated using tomographic imaging concepts.
The technology was first demonstrated by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2019, and a Swiss group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020. It is significantly faster than traditional 3D printing in layers, can print around existing objects, and does not require support structures.
Though incredible, the technology can get messy in the lab. The vial’s round shape makes it refract rays like a lens. To counter this, experts use a rectangular index-matching bath that provides a flat surface for rays to pass through correctly. The vial of resin must be dipped in and out of the bath for each use—creating a slimy situation.
An international team of researchers have come up with a fusion-based spacecraft thruster that uses a hydrogen isotope called deuterium as a fuel source, as Popular Mechanics reports.
Their “direct fusion drive,” (DFD) — as detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed preprint — is theoretically able to speed up a spacecraft to a blistering 44 kilometers per second, covering the distance from here to Neptune and beyond in less than a decade.
While electric propulsion systems powered by the rays of the Sun have allowed us to explore the inner reaches of our solar system, venturing beyond Jupiter would require gigantic solar arrays, the team argues in its paper.
Our physical space-time reality isn’t really “physical” at all, its apparent solidity of objects, as well as any other associated property such as time, is an illusion. As a renowned physicist Niels Bohr once said: “Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” But what’s not an illusion is your subjective experience, i.e., your consciousness; that’s the only “real” thing, according to proponents of Experiential Realism. It refers to interacting entangled conscious agents at various ontological levels, giving rise to conscious experience all the way down, and I’d argue all the way up, seemingly ad infinitum. It’s a “matryoshka” of embedded realities: conscious minds within larger minds.
#ExperientialRealism
So, why Experiential Realism? From the bigger picture perspective, we are here for experience necessary for evolution of our conscious minds. Our limitations, such as our ego, belief traps, political correctness, our very human condition define who we are, but the realization that we largely impose those limitations on ourselves gives us more evolvability and impetus to overcome these self-imposed limits to move towards higher goals and state of being.
We are what we’ve experienced — the sum of our experiences define who we are. In this sense, as free will agents, we are co-creators within this experiential matrix. Non-duality is the essence of Experiential Realism — experience and experiencer are one. How can you possibly separate your own existence from the world, the observer from the observed? Today, philosophers and scientists argue that information is fundamental but consciousness is required to assign meaning to it. That makes consciousness (our experience in a broader sense) the most fundamental, irreducible ground of existence itself, while some philosophers suggest consciousness is all that is.
DARPA awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 million contract to provide positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payloads for the Blackjack program.
WASHINGTON — The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency awarded Northrop Grumman a $13.3 million contract to provide positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) payloads for the Blackjack program.
Blackjack is a DARPA project to demonstrate the military utility of small satellites in low Earth orbit to provide communications, missile warning and PNT. Northrop Grumman’s contract was awarded April 28, according to sam.gov.
The company will supply two payloads that broadcast a new signal that is not dependent on the Global Positioning System.
