In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history.
Thanks to some (very) remote engineering work by NASA, the intrepid explorer’s science mission is back on.
Once considered an unimportant curiosity, Z-DNA is now recognized to provide an on-the-fly mechanism to regulate how an RNA transcript is edited.
The Infant Gut Microbiome and Probiotics that Work.
SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts say the ship is living up to high-tech expectations — but there was one rougher moment.
An analysis of more than 200,000 spiral galaxies has revealed unexpected links between spin directions of galaxies, and the structure formed by these links might suggest that the early universe could have been spinning, according to a Kansas State University study.
Lior Shamir, a K-State computational astronomer and computer scientist, presented the findings at the 236th American Astronomical Society meeting in June 2020. The findings are significant because the observations conflict with some previous assumptions about the large-scale structure of the universe.
Since the time of Edwin Hubble, astronomers have believed that the universe is inflating with no particular direction and that the galaxies in it are distributed with no particular cosmological structure. But Shamir’s recent observations of geometrical patterns of more than 200,000 spiral galaxies suggest that the universe could have a defined structure and that the early universe could have been spinning. Patterns in the distribution of these galaxies suggest that spiral galaxies in different parts of the universe, separated by both space and time, are related through the directions toward which they spin, according to the study.
A shaky ride to a smooth launch
Posted in space
Ordinarily, planning a mid-afternoon launch from Florida during the summer would be inadvisable, especially if there’s no margin for error. The heat and humidity can make for “dynamic” weather conditions (to use a word that came up frequently in forecasts last week) that make it difficult to predict if a launch can proceed.
However, the schedule for the Demo-2 commercial crew mission was dictated not by Mother Nature but instead by Isaac Newton. The launch was tied to the orbit of the International Space Station so that the Crew Dragon spacecraft could reach the station after launch. That required an instantaneous launch window that, in late May, happened to be in the afternoon from the Kennedy Space Center.
Still, try explaining that to the boss. “I was told that the rocket you just witnessed had to be launched within one second, or it would be impossible for it to hit its target,” President Donald Trump said last Saturday, after a successful launch that he watched in person. He had been at the Kennedy Space Center three days earlier as well, when weather conditions didn’t quite clear in time to allow the launch.
Indian start-up Nugenics Research to commercialise “Elixir” after showing 54% age reversal in animal study.
If you are interested in artificial general intelligence (AGI), then I have a panel discussion to recommend. My friend, David Wood, has done a masterful job of selecting three panelists with deep insight into possible regulation of AGI. One of the panelists was my friend, Dan Faggella, who was eloquent and informative as usual. For this session of the London Futurists, David Wood selected two other panelists with significantly different opinions on how to properly restrain AGI.
As research around the world proceeds to improve the power, the scope, and the generality of AI systems, should developers adopt regulatory frameworks to help steer progress?
What are the main threats that such regulations should be guarding against? In the midst of an intense international race to obtain better AI, are such frameworks doomed to be ineffective? Might such frameworks do more harm than good, hindering valuable innovation? Are there good examples of precedents, from other fields of technology, of international agreements proving beneficial? Or is discussion of frameworks for the governance of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) a distraction from more pressing issues, given the potential long time scales ahead before AGI becomes a realistic prospect?
KINSHASA (Reuters) — Authorities in Congo announced a new Ebola outbreak in the western city of Mbandaka on Monday, adding to another epidemic of the virus that has raged in the east since 2018.
Physicists are figuring out how close you can get to a black hole before you are unlikely to escape. That threshold is called the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO).