Lifeboat Foundation

BioMed Realty, a real estate development firm that specializes in life-sciences and biotech space, is taking over development of a multi-acre site in Somerville’s Assembly Square to create a “best-in-class life science office park.”

BioMed has agreed to acquire an existing office at 5 Middlesex Ave. in Somerville, as well as 7.5 acres of land for future development, from a joint venture of Novaya Real Estate Ventures and Cresset Development. The firms did not disclose terms of the agreement.

BioMed, which investment giant Blackstone acquired in 2016, has a local portfolio spanning 3.5 million square feet, including a number of properties in Cambridge, as well as facilities in Watertown and Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. Its most recent project proposal in Cambridge is for a 16-story office and lab at 585 Third St.

Duke University researchers have developed an AI tool that can turn blurry, unrecognizable pictures of people’s faces into eerily convincing computer-generated portraits, in finer detail than ever before.

Previous methods can scale an image of a face up to eight times its original resolution. But the Duke team has come up with a way to take a handful of pixels and create realistic-looking faces with up to 64 times the resolution, ‘imagining’ features such as fine lines, eyelashes and stubble that weren’t there in the first place.

“Never have super-resolution images been created at this resolution before with this much detail,” said Duke computer scientist Cynthia Rudin, who led the team.

True genetic isolation is hard to pull off. Human populations tend to mix when they are in close proximity.

Consider the Hui people. These are Muslims who live across China and speak the local Chinese dialect of their locale. The Hui claim descent from Central Asians and Persians who arrived in China around 1,000 years ago. But the vast majority of their genomes are no different from the Han Chinese. Physically they are impossible to distinguish from Han Chinese unless you take note of their attire.

How can that be when they are so culturally different? For example, as Muslims the Hui do not eat pork and consider it unclean. In contrast, for the majority Han pork is dietary staple.

Analysing data from hundreds of major earthquakes, Doyeon Kim at the University of Maryland and his colleagues have found a new structure beneath the volcanic Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The structure, known as an ultra-low velocity (ULV) zone, is about 1000 kilometres in diameter and 25 kilometres thick, says Kim.

These structures are called ULV zones because seismic waves pass through them at slower velocities, but what they are made of is still a mystery. They might be chemically distinct from Earth’s iron–nickel alloy core and silicate rock mantle, or have different thermal properties.

The researchers discovered the structure while analysing 7000 records of seismic activity from earthquakes that occurred around the Pacific Ocean basin between 1990 and 2018. The earthquakes all had a magnitude of 6.5 or greater, and were all deeper than 200 kilometres below Earth’s surface.

SpaceX is developing a massive stainless-steel Starship that will one day take one hundred passengers to Mars. The company aims to launch the fist Starship with cargo by 2022 and targets 2024 for the first crewed voyage to Mars. The first mission to Mars will consist of taking over 100 tons of cargo humans will need to survive on the rough Martian environment. Vital things like Oxygen and food will be transported to Mars first, so, when the first astronauts arrive, they will have more survival resources. Then, the second mission will transport the first humans to the Red Planet.

Yes— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 5, 2020

Stop us if you’ve heard this before but a researcher has uncovered a new security vulnerability affecting many devices running the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol.

Named CallStranger by discoverer Yunus Çadırcı, the potential for trouble with this flaw looks significant for a whole menu of reasons, starting with the gotcha that it’s UPnP.

UPnP was invented back in the mists of time to graft the idea of plug-and-play onto the knotty world of home networking.

Many cultures have found religious experiences with creatures and this soronan desert road has naturally occurring dmt with has actually created many religious organizations for centuries.

Our Vice Mexico team went to the Sonora desert in search of the Bufo Alvarius, an endemic toad species that contains a very high dosage of 5-MEO-DMT in it´s body. 5-MEO-DMT is said to be the most potent hallucinogenic in the world.

Continue reading “Getting High with a Hallucinogenic Toad Prophet” »