Lifeboat Foundation

Britain could soon be sending tourists into orbit after the UK Space Agency began drafting regulations to allow human launches from spaceports in Cornwall and the Scottish Highlands.

The government is already committed to putting satellites into space from British soil and recently signed a deal with Virgin Orbit to start building the facilities to allow horizontal launches.

Now the UK Space Agency has confirmed it is drawing up regulations to allow sub-orbital human spaceflight, with Virgin Galactic the most likely candidate to take tourists beyond Earth’s atmosphere where they can experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet.

Tech Armor is a tech power in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3’s single-player and multiplayer modes.

The power generates an energy armor suit that boosts the user’s shields.

Neuromorphic computing has had little practical success in building machines that can tackle standard tests such as logistic regression or image recognition. But work by prominent researchers is combining the best of machine learning with simulated networks of spiking neurons, bringing new hope for neuromorphic breakthroughs.

O, o.

The VertiGo robot uses two propellers to defy gravity and climb walls.

The geth (“Servant of the People” in Khelish) are a race of networked artificial intelligences that reside beyond the Perseus Veil. The geth were created by the quarians as laborers and tools of war. When the geth became sentient and began to question their masters, the quarians attempted to exterminate them. The geth won the resulting war, and reduced the quarians to a race of nomads.

The history of the geth’s creation and evolution serves as a warning to the rest of the galaxy of the potential dangers of artificial intelligence and to the legally enforced, systematic repression of artificial intelligences throughout galactic society.

Let’s face it, you’ve always wanted to see Nicolas Cage as James Bond and Indiana Jones.

All hail the mushroom king :P.

It’s the fungus mushrooms are made of, but it can also produce everything from plastics to plant-based meat to a scaffolding for growing organs—and much more.

• By Eben Bayer on July 1, 2019

Female bedbugs who are ‘full bellied’ and therefore more attractive mates for males, are able to boost their immune systems in anticipation of catching sexually transmitted infections, research has found.

Led by the University of Sheffield, the research discovered a correlation between fed females and the chances of them being inseminated and therefore infected as a result.

To mitigate this, female bedbugs that have just dined on blood and are therefore full, are able to cleverly manage their simple immune system in anticipation of mating. This is in comparison to female bedbugs that do not get regular food, do not mate regularly and therefore do not have the same need to boost their immune system in defence of infection.

Oxidation numbers have so far eluded any rigorous quantum mechanical definition. A new SISSA study, published in Nature Physics, provides such a definition based on the theory of topological quantum numbers, which was honored with the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Thouless, Haldane and Kosterlitz. This result, combined with recent advances in the theory of transport achieved at SISSA, paves the way to an accurate, yet tractable, numerical simulation of a broad class of materials that are important in energy-related technologies and planetary sciences.

Every undergraduate student in the natural sciences learns how to associate an integer oxidation number to a chemical species participating in a reaction. Unfortunately, the very concept of oxidation state has thus far eluded a rigorous quantum mechanical definition, so that no method was known until now to compute oxidation numbers from the fundamental laws of nature, let alone demonstrate that their use in the simulation of charge transport does not spoil the quality of numerical simulations. At the same time, the evaluation of electric currents in ionic conductors, which is required to model their transport properties, is presently based on a cumbersome quantum-mechanical approach that severely limits the feasibility of large-scale computer simulations. Scientists have lately noticed that a simplified model where each atom carries a charge equal to its oxidation number may give results in surprising good agreement with rigorous but much more expensive approaches.