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Aug 3, 2019

Exclusive: Lux Capital Raises More Than $1 Billion Across Two New Funds to Invest in Companies Building a Sci-Fi Future

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biological, finance, nuclear energy

Lux Capital, a New York-based venture capital firm, has raised more than $1 billion across two new funds to back companies on “the cutting edge of science.” The firm raised $500 million for its sixth flagship early-stage fund and another $550 million for an opportunity fund focused on growth-stage investments. Limited partners include global foundations, university endowments, and tech billionaires.

Lux also announced a new hire: Deena Shakir, formerly of GV (Google Ventures), has joined as an investment partner.

To the regular person, Lux’s investments are considered moonshot. The firm has backed entrepreneurs that are working on everything from neurostimulation to nuclear energy to synthetic biology. During my last interview with co-founder and managing partner Josh Wolfe, I actually called one of his portfolio companies “freaking crazy.”

Aug 3, 2019

This isn’t Boeing to end well: Plane maker to scrap some physical cert tests, use computer simulations instead

Posted by in categories: computing, transportation

What have we learned from fifty years of “software crisis”?


Actually probe expensive gear in real life? Pah. It’s 2019. We’re Boeing digital.

Aug 3, 2019

US Army Fielding 50 Kilowatt Lasers in 2022 and 300 KW In 2024

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

The US Army will field 50 kilowatt (kW)-class lasers on a platoon of four Stryker vehicles in 2022. They will support the Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense (M-SHORAD) mission. The directed energy M-SHORAD capability is intended to protect maneuvering Brigade Combat Teams from unmanned aerial systems (UAS), rotary-wing aircraft, and rockets, artillery and mortar (RAM).

Aug 3, 2019

Wall Street’s equities titans are in the midst of an expensive technological arms race. Here’s why

Posted by in category: futurism

The major forces shaping equity markets — regulation and technology — are to blame. In the past decade, trillions of dollars moved from active to passive strategies such as index funds, while quants and high-speed firms have taken over more volumes in daily trading.


‘Algo wheels’ and the rise of the machines: How stock trading became Wall Street’s winner-take-all battleground.

Aug 2, 2019

Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies

Posted by in category: nanotechnology

ISN research is organized into three Strategic Research Areas (SRAs), representing the most fundamental subject areas for scientific inquiry at the Institute. SRAs are designed to address broad strategic challenges facing the Soldier, and are subdivided into specific Projects.

Aug 2, 2019

Finally, a Real-Life Memory-Erasing Technique for Humans

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Get your Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references ready, because scientists have just figured out a way to erase bad memories using—you guessed it—electroshock therapy. Get ready for on-demand forgetting. It’s a real thing now.

A team of Dutch neuroscientists recently devised an electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to “target and disrupt patients’ memory of a disturbing episode.” Nature explains how patients were showed two traumatic narratives in a slideshow and then subjected to the new technique:

The team later prompted patients to recall only one of the stories by replaying part of that slide show. Immediately afterwards, when the reactivated memory is thought to be vulnerable, the patients received electroconvulsive therapy.

Continue reading “Finally, a Real-Life Memory-Erasing Technique for Humans” »

Aug 2, 2019

NSA Whistleblower — Karen Melton-Stewart

Posted by in categories: government, privacy

The government would never target innocent citizens much less whistleblowers, journalists or activists who are “inconvenient”, right? No history of heinous wrong-doing — right?

Aug 2, 2019

Physicists Just Captured The First-Ever Footage of a Molecule’s Spectacular Rotation

Posted by in categories: entertainment, physics

Imagine trying to film an event that was over and done within a mere 125 trillionths of a second. It’s something that molecular physicists have long been dreaming of, and at last it seems they’ve achieved their goal.

Using precisely tuned pulses of laser light, an international team of scientists from four different institutions has managed to film the ultrafast rotation of a molecule.

“We recorded a high-resolution molecular movie of the ultrafast rotation of carbonyl sulphide as a pilot project,” said molecular physicist Evangelos Karamatskos from DESY, Germany’s largest accelerator centre.

Aug 2, 2019

Turning water into ice in the quantum realm

Posted by in categories: particle physics, quantum physics

When you pop a tray of water into the freezer, you get ice cubes. Now, researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Toronto have achieved a similar transition using clouds of ultracold atoms.

In a study that will appear August 2 in the journal Science Advances, the team discovered that it could nudge these to undergo transitions between “dynamical phases”—essentially, jumping between two states in which the behave in completely different ways.

“This happens abruptly, and it resembles the we see in systems like water becoming ice,” said study co-author Ana Maria Rey. “But unlike that tray of ice cubes in the freezer, these phases don’t exist in equilibrium. Instead, atoms are constantly shifting and evolving over time.”

Aug 2, 2019

Two-dimensional (2-D) nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy with a microfluidic diamond quantum sensor

Posted by in categories: biological, quantum physics, space

Quantum sensors based on nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond are a promising detection mode for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy due to their micron-scale detection volume and noninductive-based sample detection requirements. A challenge that exists is to sufficiently realize high spectral resolution coupled with concentration sensitivity for multidimensional NMR analysis of picolitre sample volumes. In a new report now on Science Advances, Janis Smits and an interdisciplinary research team in the departments of High Technology Materials, Physics and Astronomy in the U.S. and Latvia addressed the challenge by spatially separating the polarization and detection phases of the experiment in a microfluidic platform.

They realized a of 0.65±0.05 Hz, an order-of-magnitude improvement compared with previous diamond NMR studies. Using the platform, they performed 2-D correlation spectroscopy of liquid analytes with an effective detection volume of ~40 picoliters. The research team used diamond as in-line microfluidic NMR detectors in a major step forward for applications in mass-limited chemical analysis and single-cell biology.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a powerful and well-established technique for compositional, structural and functional analysis in a variety of scientific disciplines. In conventional NMR spectrometry the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is strongly dependent on the external field strength (B0). As the spectral resolution increased, the B0 increased as well, motivating the development of increasingly large and expensive superconducting magnets for improved resolution and SNR, resulting in a two-fold increase in field strength within the past 25 years.