Lifeboat Foundation

Rocket Lab is getting ready to fly its tenth mission, which the first official launch window during which it could happen set for this week on November 29. Aside from being a milestone 10th mission (dubbed ‘Running Out of Fingers,’ ha), this will be the first time that Rocket Lab includes technology designed to help it eventually recover and reuse elements of its launch vehicle.

After first designing its Electron launch platform as a fully expendable spacecraft, meaning it could only do one way trips to bring cargo to orbit, Rocket Lab announced that it would be moving towards rocket reusability at an event hosted by CEO and founder Peter Beck in August. To make this happen, the company will be developing and testing the tech necessary to recover Electron’s first-stage rocket booster over the course of multiple missions.

Toe be clear, this mission has the primary goal of delivering a number of small satellites on behalf of paying customers, including microsatellites from Alba Orbital and a Tokyo –based company called ALE that is using microsatellites to simulate particles from meteors. But Rocket Lab will also be testing recovery instrumentation loaddd on board the Electron vehicle, including guidance and navigation systems, as well as telemetry and flight computer hardware. This will be used to gather real-time data about the process of re-entry for Electron’s first stage, and Rocket Lab will also attempt to make use of a reaction control system to control the orientation of the booster as it re-enters.

University of Edinburgh tested 1000 people aged 70 for memory, problem solving, thinking speed and general thinking ability — the same people were tested every three years until they reached 79.

LONDON (AP) — Four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.

In a report late last week, the World Health Organization and partners noted nine new polio cases caused by the vaccine in Nigeria, Congo, Central African Republic and Angola. Seven countries elsewhere in Africa have similar outbreaks and cases have been reported in Asia, including the two countries where polio remains endemic, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In rare cases, the live virus in oral polio vaccine can mutate into a form capable of sparking new outbreaks. All the current vaccine-derived polio cases have been sparked by a Type 2 virus contained in the vaccine. Type 2 wild virus was eliminated years ago.

New research in mice finds that blocking a key molecule can slow the progression of multiple sclerosis. The findings pave the way for new treatments.

Ride-hailing service to continue while it appeals against Transport for London decision.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has officially launched the Contract for the Web, a set of principles designed to “fix” the internet and prevent us from sliding into a “digital dystopia,” The Guardian reports. The contract lists nine core principles for governments, companies, and individuals to adhere to, including responsibilities to provide affordable, reliable internet access and to respect civil discourse and human dignity.

At launch, the initiative has received the backing of over 150 organizations, including tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, DuckDuckGo, and Facebook, and nonprofit groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Guardian initially reported that Amazon and Twitter were absent from the list of backers, however as of November 25th, Twitter’s logo has appeared on the Contract’s homepage. Twitter’s increasing role in political discourse was recently brought into sharp focus after it chose to ban political ads on its platform, citing the “challenges to civic discourse” that they create.

The contract’s launch comes as tech companies such as Facebook and Google have faced mounting pressure around both the amount of user data they collect, and the ways in which they collect it. The Contract for the Web includes principles designed to prevent this, including a requirement for companies to respect people’s privacy and personal data. If companies do not show that they are working to support these aims they risk being removed from the list of the project’s endorsers.

Park Las Vegas, sponsored by Bleutech Park Properties, Inc. is breaking ground in the Las Vegas Valley in December 2019 as the first city in the world to boast a digital revolution in motion, redefining the infrastructure industry sector. This $7.5 billion, six year project, will be constructed of net-zero buildings within their own insular mini-city, featuring automated multi-functional designs, renewable energies from solar/wind/water/kinetic, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality, Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, supertrees, and self-healing concrete structures.

Bleutech Park’s mixed-use environment featuring workforce housing, offices, retail space, ultra-luxury residential, hotel and entertainment will introduce a new high-tech biome to the desert valley.

Two security sleuths last month discovered an enormous amount of data that was left exposed on a server. Data found on the server belonged to around 1.2 billion people.

Kartikay Mehrotra wrote about it on Friday for Bloomberg, in a story, along with one from Wired, that was frequently quoted over the weekend. The data was left unprotected on a Google Cloud server.

The FBI were contacted and the server was shut down. Not trivial. Wired referred to the situation as a “jumbo” data leak. Wired said the information was sitting exposed and easily accessible on an unsecured server.

An international team led by researchers at Princeton University has directly observed a surprising quantum effect in a high-temperature iron-containing superconductor.

Superconductors conduct electricity without resistance, making them valuable for long-distance electricity transmission and many other energy-saving applications. Conventional superconductors operate only at extremely low temperatures, but certain iron-based materials discovered roughly a decade ago can superconduct at relatively high temperatures and have drawn the attention of researchers.

Exactly how superconductivity forms in iron-based materials is something of a mystery, especially since iron’s magnetism would seem to conflict with the emergence of superconductivity. A deeper understanding of unconventional materials such as iron-based superconductors could lead eventually to new applications for next-generation energy-saving technologies.