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Here, he became an authority on the aurora, and after that the director of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He later used his reputation and connections to establish the International Arctic Research Center. His look-away-from-the-crowd nature once made a writer describe him as Alaska’s climate-change skeptic.

Wearing suspenders and a button-up dress shirt, Akasofu would — every weekday until the 2020 pandemic — drive 3 miles into the university for a few hours. His workspace is a cubicle in the Akasofu Building. That sun-catching, metal-and-glass structure on the highest part of the Fairbanks campus houses a science institute — the International Arctic Research Center — that would not exist without him.

Akasofu’s Alaska journey began when he wrote a letter to Sydney Chapman, a British space physicist who lived a reverse-snowbird existence, living in Fairbanks in the winter and Boulder, Colorado, in the summer.

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The quality and complexity of dreams appear to change with our stages of sleep, according to a new analysis.

Before the twenty-first century, we used to think dreams only occurred during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, but more recent research shows people sometimes recall dreams even when they are woken from non-REM stages of sleep.

Whether these two types of dreaming are inherently different is something neuroscientists are still trying to figure out.

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From a pile of seaweed to a packet of soy sauce.

The London startup Notpla has created a plastic alternative from seaweed that’s biodegradable — and even edible. And it’s hoping it could put a dent in the 300 million tons of plastic waste humans generate each year.

Notpla’s natural plastic-like casing is biodegradable within four to six weeks, the company says, compared to the several hundred years it takes synthetic plastics to biodegrade.

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Summary: A new AI system helps researchers better understand the brain computations that underlie thought.

Source: Baylor University.

A team led by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University has developed artificial intelligence (AI) models that help them better understand the brain computations that underlie thoughts. This is new, because until now there has been no method to measure thoughts. The researchers first developed a new model that can estimate thoughts by evaluating behavior, and then tested their model on a trained artificial brain where they found neural activity associated with those estimates of thoughts. The theoretical study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The technology doesn’t seem to be here yet; obviously, the ice on Mars will be harvested to provide drinking and irrigation water.

If we ever intend to send crewed missions to deep-space locations, then we need to come up with solutions for keeping the crews supplied. For astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), who regularly receive resupply missions from Earth, this is not an issue. But for missions traveling to destinations like Mars and beyond, self-sufficiency is the name of the game.

This is the idea behind projects like BIOWYSE and TIME SCALE, which are being developed by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Space (CIRiS) in Norway. These two systems are all about providing astronauts with a sustainable and renewable supply of drinking water and plant food. In so doing, they address two of the most important needs of humans performing long-duration missions that will take them far from home.

Continue reading “How to make the food and water Mars-bound astronauts will need for their mission” | >

Dogmatic individuals tend to form less accurate judgements thanks to a generic resistance to seeking out additional information, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings shed new light on the cognitive underpinnings of dogmatic worldviews.

“We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it,” explained study author Lion Schulz, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

“In turn, if we don’t check on quick and uncertain judgements, this can leave us quite vulnerable to misinformation. Understanding the mechanism behind such decisions and how different people approach them is therefore important when we try to understand the current societal climate.”

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Global #connectivity lets for #digitalidentity for billions of people worldwide, giving them access to #telehealth, #education, #careers, #entertainment and #finance services, as well as raising #cybersecurity and #dataprivacy concernsRe-sharing. Starlink can help telemedicine become more reliable and available to people in need. Especially those in rurual or far flung locations.

Video Source/Credit: SpaceX Youtube Channel

One interesting sub-division of SpaceX is Starlink, which is Musk’s venture into increasing global connectivity. Starlink’s mission is to use a global network of low Earth orbit satellites to eventually “deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable.” While satellite internet itself is not a novel concept, most of the traditional systems use dated technology that have far less capabilities with regards to internet speed, connectivity, and sustainability. Starlink’s goal is to provide high-speed broadband internet, using cutting-edge satellite systems that will also not add to the space pollution created by traditional systems. As of now, the company states that it “is targeting service in the Northern U.S. and Canada in 2020, rapidly expanding to near global coverage of the populated world by 2021.”

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s Starlink May Potentially Revolutionize Healthcare” | >

Drone privacy laws vary all around the world — and what might get you a great shot in one country could get you jail time in another.

Surfshark, a digital security firm, introduces Mapped: The state of drone privacy laws in (nearly) every country.

Drone privacy is serious business – and what gets you a great image in one country could get you a jail term in another. Finding these laws, however, is hit or miss – so this new research from Surfshark is a great place to start for world travelers.

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