Lifeboat Foundation

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO. — It’s not easy to get into the GPS room. A security cocoon typical of U.S. military installations protects Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado, but the windowless home of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron (2SOPS) lies within the base’s “restricted access area.” A gatehouse, extra vehicle barriers, armed guards, monitored communication channels, and a total ban on smartphones stand between the outside world and the place where the U.S. Air Force operates the GPS satellite constellation.

Inside you’ll find a hallway lined with keypad-controlled doors. Behind each is a room with 10-person teams who fly satellites. The rooms are staffed around the clock. The 2SOP squadron not only runs the constellation that provides global navigation and precise time data to civilian and military users.

Continue reading “The Future of GPS Is Taking Shape Inside These Locked Rooms” »

The personnel changes at Alphabet continue, this time with Mustafa Suleyman — one of the three co-founders of the company’s influential AI lab DeepMind — moving to Google.

Suleyman announced the news on Twitter, saying that after a “wonderful decade” at DeepMind, he would be joining Google to work with the company’s head of AI Jeff Dean and its chief legal officer Kent Walker. The exact details of Suleyman’s new role are unclear but a representative for the company told The Verge it would involve work on AI policy.

The move is notable, though, as it was reported earlier this year that Suleyman had been placed on leave from DeepMind. (DeepMind disputed these reports, saying it was a mutual decision intended to give Suleyman “time out … after 10 hectic years.”) Some speculated that Suleyman’s move was the fallout of reported tensions between DeepMind and Google, as the former struggled to commercialize its technology.

Many of us are drawn to beauty in mathematics. But is that the way nature really works?

A type of artificial intelligence technique is now being used to develop new drugs and therapies and could perhaps even help to solve aging.

An urgent need for aging biomarkers

There has long been an urgent need in our field to develop increasingly accurate biomarkers of aging so that the efficacy of interventions can be gauged. Deep learning is one of the more recent techniques being applied in the search for aging biomarkers.

Life expectancy rose, and so did the number of years we spend without serious health problems, researchers say.

Libella Gene Therapeutics, LLC (“Libella”) announces a clinical trial in Colombia (South America) using telomere-lengthening gene therapy to reverse aging and possibly cure age-related diseases. Libella has chosen bioaccess™ as its CRO for this trial.

UCLA scientists have discovered a link between a protein and the ability of human blood stem cells to self-renew. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports that activating the protein causes blood stem cells to self-renew at least twelvefold in laboratory conditions.

Multiplying blood stem cells in conditions outside the human body could greatly improve treatment options for blood cancers like leukemia and for many inherited blood diseases.

Dr. Hanna Mikkola, a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UCLA and senior author of the study, has studied blood stem cells for more than 20 years.

Accelerating rejuvenation therapies to repair the damage of aging. Berlin, May 21 — 23.

University of Maryland researchers showed sight deprivation changes how groups of neurons work together and alters their sensitivity to different frequencies.

Scientists have known that depriving adult mice of vision can increase the sensitivity of individual neurons in the part of the brain devoted to hearing. New research from biologists at the University of Maryland revealed that sight deprivation also changes the way brain cells interact with one another, altering neuronal networks and shifting the mice’s sensitivity to different frequencies. The research was published in the November 19, 2019 issue of the journal eNeuro.