Lifeboat Foundation

The Air Force’s top general says one of the designers of the ride-sharing app Uber is helping the branch build a new data-sharing network that the Air Force hopes will help service branches work together to detect and destroy targets.

The network, which the Air Force is calling the advanced battle management system (ABMS), would function a bit like the artificial intelligence construct Cortana from Halo, who identifies enemy ships and the nearest assets to destroy them at machine speed, so all the fleshy humans need to do is give a nod of approval before resuming their pipe-smoking.

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Brian Kennedy, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Physiology at the National University of Singapore (NUS) will be joining the LEAF scientific advisory board.

Professor Kennedy is an important figure in the research community, as he is internationally recognized for his research and efforts to translate those findings into therapies that could potentially slow, delay, or even prevent age-related diseases. He previously served as the President of the Buck Institute, where he still remains as a Professor.

At the NUS, he is developing therapeutic interventions that directly target human aging along with biomarkers that can validate if a therapy has worked or not. Professor Kennedy and his team have been exploring the epigenetic clock, a biomarker that measures methylation of the human genome to determine biological age. They are also investigating inflammatory biomarkers of aging using metabolomics, the study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the intermediates and products of metabolism.

The world’s first completely robotic heart may end the need for transplants from dead humans in as few as 10 years, the hybrid heart made of soft artificial muscles and sensors is hoped to eventually end the need for human transplants.

The hybrid robotic heart is under development and could clear NHS heart transplant waiting lists and save many lives. It is the first hybrid heart made from soft artificial muscles and sensors which are coated in human tissues that are grown in a laboratory.

There are plans partnered with the British Heart Foundation to transplant it into the first person in 2028; the hope is that this hybrid robotic heart will save thousands of lives who would normally have died while waiting for a human organ donor on global waiting lists.

Link to study paper: https://link.springer.com/…/10.1007%2Fs11357-019–00113-y.pdf

A team of researchers have built what they claim to be the first living robots. The “xenobots,” they say, can move, pick up objects, and even heal themselves after being cut.

The team is hoping the biological machines could one day be used to clean up microplastics in the ocean or even deliver drugs inside the human body, The Guardian reports.

Continue reading “Scientists Build ‘First Living Robots’ From Frog Stem Cells” »

A research group at TU Wien has developed a terahertz radiation source that is both efficient and creates a broad spectrum, generating different wavelengths from the entire terahertz range. Both aspects are said to have broken previously held records.

#lasers #photonics

• Some everyday things are near-impossible for astronauts to do in space.
• Common items like salt and bread are banned from the International Space Station due to fears that they’ll send floating pieces everywhere and potentially damage space equipment or accidentally get inhaled by astronauts.
• Basic eating, sleeping, and showering habits must also be modified.

Astronauts make a lot of sacrifices when they venture off of Earth.

Besides the dangers of space travel and time away from family, microgravity comes with a whole new set of rules that dictates many facets of everyday life.

Taiwan has been the world’s hardware hub for decades, so the shift toward AI makes the most of the existing inexpensive engineering talent. A refocus on AI, however, reduces reliance on hardware, which can easily be made somewhere else, such as China, at lower costs. Multinational tech companies have already shown interest in tapping Taiwan’s talent in software, including AI.

To move things along further, the government of Hsinchu County, near Taipei, will open a 126,000-square-meter (about 1.3 million square feet) AI business park near one of Taiwan’s major all-purpose high-tech zones and two top universities.

“[The park] will not just help [promote] industry-academia cooperation, but also let AI-oriented startups and companies have a demo space to verify AI product services,” says Shirley Tsai, a research manager with IDC Taiwan’s enterprise solution group. “It will be helpful as well to attract the companies who are interested in the AI field and then accelerating the AI ecosystem.”

DirecTV has been granted permission by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to send a damaged communications satellite in danger of exploding into an emergency disposal trajectory. The Boeing-built Spaceway-1 direct-broadcast satellite suffered a “major anomaly” last month that caused severe thermal damage to its batteries and must now be moved to an orbit where it will not pose a hazard to other spacecraft.

Orbiting space debris is a major and growing hazard and there has been a great deal of effort in recent years to both clean up dead satellites and to minimize the production of more debris. This not only includes the building of tougher spacecraft that won’t shed bits and pieces but also making sure that damaged satellites are properly disposed of before they become a threat.

According to documents filed by DirecTV with the FCC, the 13,400-lb (6,080-kg) Spaceway-1, which is in a geosynchronous orbit 35,800 km (22,200 mi) above the Earth’s equator, was damaged by an unspecified event in December 2019. Telemetry from the satellite was examined by Boeing engineers who concluded that the batteries on the 702-model satellite had suffered significant and irreversible damage.