Lifeboat Foundation

Phase 3 of DARPA’s Operational Fires (OpFires) program began in earnest this month with government and contractor staff finalizing the system architecture approach, including a plan to use existing components from ground-launched missile systems, along with new booster technologies designed to support future hypersonic weapons. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control is leading the integration effort for the third phase of the program, which will focus on first stage booster design and maturation, launcher development, and vehicle integration.

Broad participation from the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, range safety offices, and performers from OpFires Phase 2 propulsion teams contributed to success in the early, critical stages of the program. Since 2018, OpFires has made impressive strides developing and demonstrating advanced booster technologies that had never been used in prior systems. Phase 1 and 2 performers Aerojet Rocketdyne, Exquadrum, and Sierra Nevada Corporation continue work towards throttle-able upper stage rocket motors suitable for tactical transport, storage, and engagement.

“The objective of DARPA’s OpFires program is to deliver an intermediate-range surface-to-surface missile in line with the Department of Defense’s push to field hypersonic platforms,” said MAJ Amber Walker (USA), the DARPA program manager for OpFires.

Autonomous and semi-autonomous systems need active illumination to navigate at night or underground. Switching on visible headlights or some other emitting system like lidar, however, has a significant drawback: It allows adversaries to detect a vehicle’s presence, in some cases from long distances away.

To eliminate this vulnerability, DARPA announced the Invisible Headlights program. The fundamental research effort seeks to discover and quantify information contained in ambient thermal emissions in a wide variety of environments and to create new passive 3D sensors and algorithms to exploit that information.

“We’re aiming to make completely passive navigation in pitch dark conditions possible,” said Joe Altepeter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. “In the depths of a cave or in the dark of a moonless, starless night with dense fog, current autonomous systems can’t make sense of the environment without radiating some signal—whether it’s a laser pulse, radar or visible light beam—all of which we want to avoid. If it involves emitting a signal, it’s not invisible for the sake of this program.”

Ogba Educational Clinic

EXCLUSIVE: In a plot which seems straight out of the Netflix original series Altered Carbon, experts have told Daily Star Online the wealthy could soon achieve immortality.

Good dog :3.

Hank and Storm show Gray Hall how they do their jobs with the Philadelphia Police.

The dogs’ handlers, Officer Alvin Outlaw, who works with Storm, and Officer Richard Treston, who is paired with Hank, say it was the weeks of training and guidance that prepared them for the heavily wooded conditions that they encountered in Bucks County. Hank sniffed out the grave first and Storm followed up with the same results.

Continue reading “The cadaver dogs who helped crack a quadruple murder” »

Elon Musk and the late Stephen Hawking are not alone in their calls for humanity to become a multi-planetary species. But they certainly are the most visible advocates for space colonization. And while the moon might be the most obvious jumping off point to the solar system and beyond, nothing stands out as a potential site for long term settlement more than Mars.

But just how realistic is sending astronauts to the Red Planet anytime soon–let alone colonizing it permanently? The obstacles are many, and aerospace engineering may well be the least of them. The human biological, psychological tolss and survival strategies–radiation, low gravity, isolation and the marshalling air, water, and food resources–all stand in the way. And then there is the economic cost and the political and public will. In this edition of Seeking Delphi,™ I talk to former NASA Mars mission navigator, Moriba Jah, about the many challenges of leaving of our home planet.

When a black hole is starting to look like an attractive option, things are real bad.

These types of therapies are used when there are no other alternatives available for diseases that can be very serious or even fatal.

A treatment that has already been used by several hospitals in Wuhan, although experts consider that ‘the evidence on its effectiveness is scarce.’

Continue reading “HIV drug successfully treats coronavirus patient in medical first in Spain’s Andalucia” »

China’s biotech companies have been gearing up to repurpose existing drugs, approved in the West for other viruses, as treatments for the coronavirus outbreak originating in Wuhan.

Last month, Hangzhou-based Ascletis Pharma applied to the Chinese authorities to test two HIV protease inhibitors (ritonavir and ASC09) in clinical trials to treat COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus (Table 1). And Suzhou-based BrightGene Bio-Medical Technology announced in early February that it would begin to manufacture Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir (GS-5734), a broad-spectrum investigational antiviral, as a treatment for coronavirus infection.

Existing antivirals and knowledge gained from the SARS and MERS outbreaks gain traction as the fastest route to fight the current coronavirus epidemic.

Scientists at Uppsala University have proposed an addition to the theory of evolution that can explain how and why genes move on chromosomes. The hypothesis, called the SNAP Hypothesis, is presented in the scientific journal PLOS Genet ics.

Life originated on Earth almost 4 billion years ago and diversified into a vast array of species. How did this diversification occur? The Theory of Evolution, together with the discovery of DNA and how it replicates, provide an answer and a mechanism. Mutations in DNA occur from generation to generation, and can be selected if they help individuals to adapt better to their environment. Over time, this has led to the separation of organisms into the different species that now inhabit all ecosystems.

Current theory holds that evolution involves mistakes made when replicating a gene. This explains how genes can mutate over time and acquire new functions. However, a mystery in biology is that the relative locations of genes on chromosomes also change over time. This is obvious in bacteria, as different species often have the same genes in very different relative locations. Since the origin of life, genes have apparently been changing location. The questions are, how and why do genes move their relative locations?