Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is a next-generation observatory that will survey the infrared universe from beyond the orbit of the Moon. The spacecraft’s giant camera, the Wide Field Instrument, will be fundamental to this exploration. Data it gathers will enable scientists to discover new and uniquely detailed information about planetary systems around other stars. The instrument will also map how matter is structured and distributed throughout the cosmos, which could ultimately allow scientists to discover the fate of the universe. Watch this video to see a simplified version of how the Wide Field Instrument works. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Unprecedented Observational Capability

After Roman launches by May 2027, each of the Wide Field Instrument’s 300-million-pixel images will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon. The instrument’s large field of view will enable sweeping celestial surveys, revealing billions of cosmic objects across vast stretches of time and space. Astronomers will conduct research that could take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

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“That is a highlight of this building that it’s very close to talent — people who are still in this area because they just graduated,” said Knight, The Engine Accelerator’s president and chief executive.

The Engine Accelerator is where companies solving hard problems get off the ground. It’s part coworking space, with open desks, office suites, and conference rooms for rent. It’s part startup accelerator, hosting a high-octane circle of young scientists and engineers who need help turning their ideas into full-fledged operations.

If WeWork and Y Combinator had a baby, and that baby wanted to bring breakthrough research out of the lab and into the real world, it’d look something like The Engine.

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Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have demonstrated a state-of-the-art hardware device that could reduce energy consumption for artificial intelligent (AI) computing applications by a factor of at least 1,000.

The research is published in npj Unconventional Computing titled “Experimental demonstration of magnetic tunnel junction-based computational random-access memory.” The researchers have multiple patents on the technology used in the device.

With the growing demand for AI applications, researchers have been looking at ways to create a more energy efficient process, while keeping performance high and costs low. Commonly, machine or artificial intelligence processes transfer data between both logic (where information is processed within a system) and memory (where the data is stored), consuming a large amount of power and energy.

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Whenever and wherever stars are born, which occurs whenever clouds of gas sufficiently collapse under their own gravity, they come in a wide variety of sizes, colors, temperatures, and masses. The largest, bluest, most massive stars contain the greatest amounts of nuclear fuel, but perhaps paradoxically, those stars are actually the shortest lived. The reason is straightforward: in any star’s core, where nuclear fusion occurs, it only occurs wherever temperatures exceed 4 million K, and the higher the temperature, the greater the rate of fusion.

So the most massive stars might have the most fuel available at the start, but that means they shine brightly as they burn through their fuel quickly. In particular, the hottest regions in the core will exhaust their fuel the fastest, leading the most massive stars to die the most quickly. The best method we have for measuring “How old is a collection of stars?” is to examine globular clusters, which form stars in isolation, often all at once, and then never again. By looking at the cooler, fainter stars that remain (and the lack of hotter, bluer, brighter, more massive stars), we can state with confidence that the Universe must be at least ~12.5–13.0 billion years old.

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The pursuit of a cure for Alzheimer’s disease is becoming an increasingly competitive and contentious quest with recent years witnessing several important controversies.

In July 2022, Science magazine reported that a key 2006 research paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature, which identified a subtype of brain protein called beta-amyloid as the cause of Alzheimer’s, may have been based on fabricated data.

One year earlier, in June 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration had approved aducanumab, an antibody-targeting beta-amyloid, as a treatment for Alzheimer’s, even though the data supporting its use were incomplete and contradictory.

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These could be incredibly valuable to future astronauts hoping to settle on the moon, acting as a convenient shelter for a lunar base.

The cave is accessible through a pit in the well-studied Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). This is a large basin made mostly of basalt. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down in this region on July 20 1969.

While Mare Tranquillitatis isn’t likely to be the first place humans try to settle on the moon, the existence of one cave makes the existence of others very likely, so scientists now expect there to be others in locations more suitable for human settlement.

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ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic scientists are using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to analyze electroencephalogram (EEG) tests more quickly and precisely, enabling neurologists to find early signs of dementia among data that typically go unexamined.

The century-old EEG, during which a dozen or more electrodes are stuck to the scalp to monitor brain activity, is often used to detect epilepsy. Its results are interpreted by neurologists and other experts trained to spot patterns among the test’s squiggly waves.

In new research published in Brain Communications, scientists at the Mayo Clinic Neurology AI Program (NAIP) demonstrate how AI can not only speed up analysis, but also alert experts reviewing the test results to abnormal patterns too subtle for humans to detect. The technology shows the potential to one day help doctors distinguish among causes of cognitive problems, such as Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. The research suggests that EEGs, which are more widely available, less expensive and less invasive than other tests to capture brain health, could be a more accessible tool to help doctors catch cognitive issues in patients early.

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