Lifeboat Foundation

You may be familiar with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. Did you know there’s a lesser-known—but similar—illness that affects deer, moose, and elk? It’s called chronic wasting disease, and like mad cow, it is also a brain disease, thought to be caused by a malformed, twisted protein called a prion. CWD leads to unusual behavior, and often results in the animals becoming gruesomely thin before they die. First discovered in 1967, CWD now has been detected in at least 26 states, three Canadian provinces, Norway, Sweden, and South Korea.

Rae Ellen Bichell, a reporter with the Mountain West News Bureau and KUNC, explored chronic wasting disease in a multipart series titled “ Bent Out Of Shape.” She joins Ira to talk about the disease, research into its origin and spread, and what’s known about the possible effects of human exposure to CWD.

Check out the full series.

Sheila Gujrathi has worked as a doctor, a McKinsey consultant, and at an up-and-coming biotech. Each role prepared her to be CEO in different ways.

New LulzBot bioprinting hardware coming 2019 with long term goal of printing real functional tissues.

Researchers combine deep learning and symbolic reasoning for a more flexible way of teaching computers to program.

That’s not all. Imagine charging your smartwatch while you wear it.

The experimental Ebola vaccine being used to try to contain the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is protective 97.5% of the time.

To date, more than 110,000 users have run more than 7 million experiments on the public IBM Q Experience devices, publishing more than 145 third-party research papers based on experiments run on the devices. The IBM Q Network has grown to 45 organizations all over the world, including Fortune 500 companies, research labs, academic institutions, and startups. This goal of helping industries and individuals get “quantum ready” with real quantum hardware is what makes IBM Q stand out.

SF: What are the main technological hurdles that still need to be resolved before quantum computing goes mainstream?

JW: Today’s approximate or noisy quantum computers have a coherence time of about 100 microseconds. That’s the time in which an experiment can be run on a quantum processor before errors take over. Error mitigation and error correction will need to be resolved before we have a fault-tolerant quantum computer.

If SpaceX gets a fully reusable Super Heavy Starship flying to orbit in 2020 and then has 100 fully reusable flights by 2023 then the cost of space will drop by 100 times. This will start fulfilling the plans for lunar bases, lunar mining, and space-based solar power.

If each Super Heavy Starship costs $300 million and has $1 million in operating and maintenance cost per flight then the per flight cost is $4 million. Super Heavy Starship is supposed to launch about 100 tons to orbit.

Assuming that 800 Starlink satellites are launched by April 2020, then SpaceX will start doubling its revenue from $2–3 billion to $5–6 billion in 2020 and ten billion in 2021. This will mean that SpaceX will be able to afford to build dozens of Super Heavy Starships.

Luminous Computing has developed an optical microchip that runs AI models much faster than other semiconductors while using less power.