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Innovation is key for developing the future of agriculture and sometimes it comes from unlikely places.

The NASA Artemis Mission is working to develop space exploration, but here on Earth, they are partnering with the University of California Berkeley to use Land Satellite Seven to benefit agriculture.

According to NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, “We can use that data from space and combine it with weather stations from Earth, and we can get very precise evapotranspiration measurements, down to a quarter of an acre. What that means is we can provide farmers with very specific irrigation plans.”

The technology is still in the testing phase but could one day make farming a little easier. “Imagine being a farmer and going out into your field with your iPhone, looking at it and having an app on there that tells you exactly what your irrigation needs to be for this quarter of an acre for this type of soil and this type of crop,” Bridenstine states.

NASA looks to partner with private businesses to bring new technologies to the market. “The challenge is land sat only has a revisit of two weeks,” he notes. “Weather changes a lot in two weeks; so, I think there is a future where a commercial company could create lots of satellites that could provide this data to farmers.”

Continue reading “NASA’s Artemis Mission looks to help better agriculture” | >

Purpose: This was an open-label phase 1a study assessing the maximum tolerated dose (MTD), safety, and tolerability of CXCR4 peptide antagonist, LY2510924, administered in combination with durvalumab in patients with advanced refractory solid tumors.

Methods: Patients received LY2510924 at 20, 30, or 40 mg subcutaneous (SC) once daily in combination with durvalumab at 1500 mg intravenously (IV) on day 1 of each 28-day cycle. The primary objective was to assess the MTD and safety of LY2510924 SC daily in combination with durvalumab in patients with advanced (metastatic and/or unresectable) solid tumors. Secondary objectives included pharmacokinetics (PK) and the antitumor activity of LY2510924 in combination with durvalumab. Exploratory objectives were biomarker analysis, including pharmacodynamic markers, relevant to LY2510924 and durvalumab, including immune functioning, drug targets, cancer-related pathways, and the disease state.

Results: Nine patients (three each at 20, 30, and 40 mg) were enrolled in the study (eight patients with pancreatic cancer and one patient with rectal cancer). The majority of patients completed one or two cycles (100.0% ≥ 1 cycle; 88.9% ≥ 2 cycles) of LY2510924 and durvalumab. No dose limiting toxicities were reported. Most common (10%) treatment-emergent adverse events were injection-site reaction (44.4%), fatigue (33.3%), and increased white blood cell count (33.3%). PK parameters for combination were similar to those reported in previous studies when given as monotherapy. Best overall response of stable disease was observed in four (44.4%) patients and one patient had unconfirmed partial response.

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Fleet operator SES on Aug. 20 said it selected SpaceX to launch four recently ordered O3b mPower broadband satellites.

SES’s four-satellite expansion order, announced Aug. 7, further increased its launch needs.

SES has now grouped the satellites into trios for the first three Falcon 9 launches, scheduled for the third quarter of 2021, the first quarter of 2022, and the second half of 2022. The last two satellites are projected to launch in the second half of 2024. Each mission will take place from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The O3b mPower constellation is designed as a multi-terabit global network capable of aiming gigabits of Ka-band capacity at customers in aviation, government, energy and other sectors. The constellation builds off of SES’s current O3b fleet of 20 satellites built by Thales Alenia Space.

Continue reading “SES taps SpaceX for two additional Falcon 9 launches” | >

This is an image of the ultraviolet “nightglow” in the Martian atmosphere over the south pole. Green and white false colors represent the intensity of ultraviolet light, with white being the brightest. The nightglow was measured at about 70 kilometers (approximately 40 miles) altitude by the Imaging UltraViolet Spectrograph instrument on NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft. A simulated view of the Mars globe is added digitally for context, and the faint white area in the center of the image is the polar ice cap. The image shows an unexpectedly bright glowing spiral in Mars’ nightside atmosphere. The cause of the spiral pattern is unknown. Credit: NASA/MAVEN/Goddard Space Flight Center/CU/LASP

Every night on Mars, when the sun sets and temperatures fall to minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and below, an eerie phenomenon spreads across much of the planet’s sky: a soft glow created by chemical reactions occurring tens of miles above the surface.

An astronaut standing on Mars couldn’t see this “nightglow”—it shows up only as ultraviolet light. But it may one day help scientists to better predict the churn of Mars’ surprisingly complex atmosphere.

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Supermassive black holes, which likely reside at the centers of virtually all galaxies, are unimaginably dense, compact regions of space from which nothing — not even light — can escape. As such a black hole, weighing in at millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun, devours material, it is surrounded by a swirling disk of gas. When gas from this disk falls towards the black hole, it releases a tremendous amount of energy. This energy creates a brilliant and powerful galactic core called a quasar, whose light can greatly outshine its host galaxy.

Astronomers widely believe that the energy from quasars is responsible for limiting the growth of massive galaxies. Shortly after the launch of NASA ’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists plan to study the effect of three carefully selected quasars on their host galaxies in a program called Q3D.

A supermassive black hole is very small compared to its host galaxy — it’s the equivalent of a penny in relation to the size of the entire Moon. Still, supermassive black holes have an immense influence on the galaxies they inhabit.

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Your accent can nod to where you come from; the pace of your speech can reveal your emotional state; your voiceprint can be used to identify you.

Linguists, companies and governments are now parsing our voices for these details, using them as biometric tools to uncover more and more information about us.

While a lot of this information is used to make our lives easier, it has also been used to controversial and worrying effect.

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In June 2019, Facebook’s AI lab, FAIR, released AI Habitat, a new simulation platform for training AI agents. It allowed agents to explore various realistic virtual environments, like a furnished apartment or cubicle-filled office. The AI could then be ported into a robot, which would gain the smarts to navigate through the real world without crashing.

In the year since, FAIR has rapidly pushed the boundaries of its work on “embodied AI.” In a blog post today, the lab has announced three additional milestones reached: two new algorithms that allow an agent to quickly create and remember a map of the spaces it navigates, and the addition of sound on the platform to train the agents to hear.

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Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has reached the $2,000 a share price point, but one investor says that its value could be looked at as “fairly low priced” in a year or two.

It’s hard to imagine that $2,000 for a share of an automaker’s stock could look like a bargain in the current economic climate. However, the CEO of AdvisorShares, Noah Hamman, thinks that TSLA’s price now could very well be looked at as a steal in a year or two.

“It’s possible a year or two from now we think that $2,000 a share was still fairly low priced, but who knows,” Hamman said to The First Trade, which is Yahoo Finance’s opening bell show.

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