Lifeboat Foundation

A Chinese scientist who helped create the world’s first gene-edited babies has been sentenced to three years in prison.

He Jiankui shocked the world in 2018 when he announced that twin girls Lulu and Nana had been born with modified DNA to make them resistant to HIV, which he had managed using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 before birth.

He, an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said at the time that he was “proud” of the achievement. He later claimed that a second woman was pregnant as a result of his research.

“When you’re out there, and you can hear them moving around, but you can’t see them, it’s like, ‘Where are they going to come from?’,” she said. “It’s a little nerve-racking at first.”

Amazon is increasingly requiring warehouse employees to get used to working with robots. The company now has more than 200,000 robotic vehicles it calls “drives” that are moving goods through its delivery-fulfillment centers around the U.S. That’s double the number it had last year and up from 15,000 units in 2014.

Its rivals have taken notice. Many are adding their own robots in a race to speed up productivity and bring down costs.

With some blockbuster space missions underway, 2019 saw some amazing images beamed back to Earth from around the Solar System. Meanwhile, some of our most powerful telescopes were trained on the Universe’s most fascinating targets. Here are a few of the best.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been sending back stunning images of Jupiter’s clouds since it arrived in orbit around the giant planet in 2016. This amazing, colour-enhanced view shows patterns that look like they were created by paper marbling. The picture was compiled from four separate images taken by the spacecraft on 29 May.

At the time, Juno was making a close pass of the fifth world from the Sun, approaching to between 18,600km (11,600 miles) and 8,600km (5,400 miles) of the swirling cloud tops.

China launched its largest-ever rocket this week: The Long March-5 Y3 rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province, carrying a Shijian-20 satellite. The launch took place at 8:45 p.m. Beijing time on Friday night, as reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua. Just over half an hour later, the satellite achieved its planned orbit and the China National Space Administration (CNSA) declared the mission a success.

The rocket stands at 57 meters (187 feet) tall, and is 5 meters in diameter around its core stage, with four boosters each of which is 3.35 meters in diameter. This makes the Long March-5 the largest Chinese carrier rocket to date, with a total weight of 870 tonnes and producing thrust of over 1000 tonnes at takeoff.

The two-stage rocket can carry a payload of up to 25 tonnes into low Earth orbit. Alternatively, for more distant launches it can carry 14 tonnes into geostationary transfer orbit, which is an elliptical orbit that is used to reach the geosynchronous orbit which holds most satellites. Looking ahead to potential missions to the Moon and Mars, the rocket is also designed to carry up to eight tonnes into Earth-Moon transfer orbit, or up to five tones into Earth-Mars transfer orbit.

The stellar engine – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical stellar engine might look like. Via this beautiful video from Kurzgesagt, Caplan Thruster, would use the Sun’s own energy to propel it across the galaxy and beyond.

As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood.

Continue reading “Physicist Proposes Radical New ‘Stellar Engine’ That Could Move Our Entire Solar System” »

For a time 20 years ago, millions of people, including corporate chiefs and government leaders, feared that the internet was going to crash and shatter on New Year’s Eve and bring much of civilization crumbling down with it. This was all because computers around the world weren’t equipped to deal with the fact of the year 2000. Their software thought of years as two digits. When the year 99 gave way to the year 00, data would behave as if it were about the year 1900, a century before, and system upon system in an almost infinite chain of dominoes would fail. Billions were spent trying to prepare for what seemed almost inevitable.

Twenty years ago, the world feared that a technological doomsday was nigh. It wasn’t, but Y2K had a lot of prescient things to say about how we interact with tech.

We want to look & feel young again, and every year we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on beauty serums, cosmetic surgery, and exotic supplements in the hopes of appearing more vibrant, healthy, and desirable.

Swarms of giant drones have been flying above Colorado and Nebraska at night, perplexing both local law enforcement and the federal government.