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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched 60 Star broadband internet satellites into orbit and landed back on Earth, making SpaceX the operator of a record-breaking 180 satellites in orbit today.

SpaceX Launches 60 Star Satellites, Nails Rocket Landing in Record-Breaking Flight : Read more

There are other views of launching so many satellites too. Astronomers say SpaceX’s satellites are too bright in the sky. Friday’s launch will try to fix that.

The US government has placed software designed to train neural networks to analyse satellite images under new export controls in a bid to prevent foreign adversaries using said code.

The decision, made by Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), is effective today. Vendors shipping software subject to the controls – in that the applications help machine learning systems annotate satellite images in a particular way – will have to apply for a license to sell their products to customers outside of the US and Canada.

“Items warrant control for export because the items may provide a significant military or intelligence advantage to the United States or because foreign policy reasons justify control,” the BIS said.

New research suggests that senolytic drugs, which remove harmful senescent cells that accumulate during aging, may be an effective therapy for glaucoma, a common age-related condition that leads to loss of vision.

In the short term, inflammation serves a useful purpose, as it helps to spur the repair and regeneration of tissue and rallies the immune system to defend against marauding invaders.

However, the chronic, smoldering, low-grade inflammation that occurs during aging can be incredibly harmful. The sources of this “inflammaging,” as some researchers describe it, include (but are not limited to) dysfunctional immune cells, cell debris, disruption to the gut microbiome, and senescent cells. Today, we are concerned about the latter after the release of a new study focusing on senescent cells and glaucoma [1].

If you’re interested in mind uploading, then I have a chapter that may be of interest to you. The title is:

by Michael Graziano and Taylor W. Webb.

This chapter describes in straightforward language a theory of consciousness termed Attention Schema Theory.

The introduction reads:

“This hypothetical building project serves as a way to introduce the theory in a step-by-step manner and contrast it with other brain-based theories of consciousness. At the same time this chapter is more than a thought experiment. We suggest that the machine could actually be built and we encourage artificial intelligence experts to try.”

Using the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), astronomers have detected a glitch in the radio pulsar PSR J0908−4913. The finding, detailed in a paper published December 18 on the arXiv preprint server, could be helpful in shedding more light on the properties and nature of this pulsar.

Extraterrestrial sources of radiation with a regular periodicity, known as pulsars, are usually detected in the form of short bursts of radio emission. Radio pulsars are generally described as highly magnetised, rapidly rotating neutron stars with a lighthouse beam of radiation that produces the pulsed emission.

Glitches are sudden changes of the pulsar’s spin rate. The exact cause of the glitches is still unknown, however, they are believed to be caused by an internal process within the pulsar. The most popular hypotheses suggest that the glitches can originate from either a transfer of angular momentum from the core to the crust via the unpinning of superfluid vortices or cracking of the star’s crust. Identifying and studying new glitches could therefore be crucial to improve our understanding of their origin and the nature of pulsars in general.