Lifeboat Foundation

The first thing many media seem not to understand is the methodology followed by Space X, which is completely different from what the traditional aerospace builders do. While the latter prefer to spend their money on a long project life cycle, including long requirements discussion, and meticulous and detailed test engineering and integration phases, Space X opts for a methodology closer to the experimental scientific method: draw essential requirements, build a prototype, test, fail, learn from failures, build a new improved prototype, and try again. Each reiteration adds quality to the project, up to a point when the prototype is working well, and Falcon 9 (as a sample) becomes the space workhorse with any more competitors in the world. Is that so hard to be understood, for journalists?When a traditional project fails, many billions are wasted, and many years of work are canceled. When a “normal” failure occurs during Space X’s reiterative project development, very less resources are wasted. And, after all, during the expendable rockets’ age, all the rockets were always wasted, at every launch! The difference is incomparable. Another advantage of this method is its high flexibility. If a project lasts 10 years, it is difficult to take advantage of the technological advances: switching to new technology in a project initiated many years ago forces heavy requirements reviews and unavoidable delays. In a fail-and-repeat project, new technologies and new ideas can be adopted more easily and more quickly, as demonstrated by the thousands of changes and improvements applied to the different starships, super-heavy boosters, and raptor engine prototypes throughout history. Despite the misfortune bearers and the envious, the methodology works. The success of Space X in the launchers market doesn’t lie.

Starship 28 and the Super-Heavy Booster 10 made most of the expected work, and even more than what was expected: while the suborbital altitude was planned, the Starship spacecraft reached 230 km, a low Earth orbit altitude at more than 26,200 km/h. several tests were conducted after the engine cutoff, including a propellant transfer demo and payload dispenser test.

Only two operations have failed. The booster couldn’t make it to descend vertically on its engines, since only 3 of them reignited, and splashed in the Mexican Gulf at little more than 1,000 km/h. The Starship failed during the re-entry in the atmosphere, in the Indian Ocean. We could observe many insulating tiles flying away from the Starship’s body during the first part of the re-entry. At an altitude of 65 km, telemetry from Ship 28 was lost, and the vehicle was destroyed before splashing in the sea.

Scientists develop anticancer drugs that target PARP proteins involved in the DNA damage response.

Why are so many young people getting cancer?

Here’s what the data say:

Clues to a modern mystery could be lurking in information collected generations ago.

Nanomedicine to Cure All!

Aortic aneurysms are bulges in the aorta, the largest blood vessel that carries oxygen-rich blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, or injury can all increase the risk of aneurysms, which tend to occur more often in Caucasian male smokers over the age of 65.

“The soft tissues that make up blood vessels act essentially like rubber bands, and it’s the elastic fibers within these tissues that allow them to stretch and snap back,” says Professor Anand Ramamurthi, chair of the Department of Bioengineering in Lehigh University’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. “These fibers are produced primarily before and just after birth. After that, they don’t regenerate or undergo natural repair after injury. So when they become injured or diseased, the tissue weakens and causes an aneurysm, which can grow over time. After about seven to 10 years, it typically reaches the rupture stage.”

Continue reading “Nanomedicine research aims to transform treatment of aortic aneurysms” »

Models of systems in physics usually start with elementary processes. New work with a neural network shows how models can also be built by observing the system as a whole and deducing the underlying interactions.

OpenAI made a big splash when it showed off its new video generator Sora last month.

The text-to-video model can be used to “create videos of up to 60 seconds featuring highly detailed scenes, complex camera motion, and multiple characters with vibrant emotions,” according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

And with stunning results, from a camera gliding through a snowy scene to photorealistic wooly mammoths.

This video shows the fly model reproducing a flight maneuver (spontaneous turning) of a real fly, executing commands to walk at a speed of 2 cm/s while turning left and right, and the model imitating a walking trajectory of the real fruit fly, which includes walking at different speeds, turning and briefly stopping. Credit: Vaxenburg et al.

By infusing a virtual fruit fly with artificial intelligence, Janelia and Google DeepMind scientists have created a computerized insect that can walk and fly just like the real thing.

Continue reading “Artificial intelligence brings a virtual fly to life” »

Long-anticipated experiments that use light to mimic gravity are revealing the distribution of energies, forces and pressures inside a subatomic particle for the first time.

Lurking some nine billion light years away from Earth is what appears to be a so-called cosmic megastructure in the shape of an enormous ring. It’s so large that its existence should be impossible, according to new research reported on by The Guardian, challenging a fundamental assumption of our understanding of the Universe.

Known as the “Big Ring,” the structure spans an astonishing 1.3 billion light years in diameter — a significant portion of the observable Universe’s estimated size of 94 billion light years. By contrast, the largest known galaxy is a “mere” 16 million light years across. If it were visible in the night sky to the naked eye, the Big Ring would be equal in diameter to fifteen full moons. Succinctly put: it’s unfathomably huge.

The unpublished findings, presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Thursday, add to a growing list of inexplicably large structures that remain confounding — if not controversial — to scientists.